"I have been astonished to discover how often a leading biochemist or archaeologist or space technician or astronaut when asked: what happened to you when you were ten years old? replied: 'Tarzan.'" — Ray Bradbury

Tarzan is one of the most recognizable pop cultural icons of the 20th century. Beginning with the novels, but quickly translating to film and beyond, Tarzan soon had his own merchandise, piracies, and international adaptations (including Bollywood films and Japanese manga). Tarzan's relationship with the movies — beginning in 1918, during the early years of popular film — was especially rich. One producer of Tarzan films, Sol Lesser, described Tarzan's global market saturation with only slight hyperbole that "there is always a Tarzan picture playing within a radius of 50 miles of any given spot in the world — in Arab villages, African bush theatres and in pampas settlements down the Argentine way" (quoted in Abate & Wannamaker, 3). But Tarzan enjoyed many revivals in print as well; in 1963 "one out of every thirty paperbacks sold was a Tarzan novel" (Torgovnick, 42). For over 100 years, Tarzan has remained a vivid figure in our popular imagination.

Tarzan's world is not all boyhood innocence: it also "embodies a powerful emblem of past white Western imperialism and, correspondingly, of the present colonialization of the world by American culture" (Abate & Wannamaker, 5). But alongside this, Tarzan has remained internationally beloved as a potent mix of the Rousseauian "noble savage" and the Swiftian "stranger in a strange land," — a mythic figure like Romulus and Remus (one of Burroughs's inspirations) or Robinson Crusoe (also an early literary phenomenon). Above all, the books were fun: as Ray Bradbury recollected, "we may have liked Verne and Wells and Kipling, but we loved, we adored, we went quite mad with Mr. Burroughs" (intro to Porges, xviii).

This copy is inscribed to Marjorie Westendarp, the daughter of Leila Hulbert, Burroughs's sister-in-law. They kept in warm and personal regular correspondence during the '40s when this book was inscribed. Burroughs notes in his presentation that this copy "is an authentic first edition," and signs it twice: once as "Edgar Rice Burroughs" and once simply as "Ed." A terrific family copy.

Read more: Zeuschner, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Exhaustive Scholar's and Collector's Descriptive Bibliography, 696; Abate & Wannamaker (eds), Global Perspectives on Tarzan: From King of the Jungle to International Icon; Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives; Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan.