Tarzan of the Apes

Tarzan of the Apes is a novel by the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, first printed in the pulp magazine The All-Story in October 1912 and published as a book in 1914. It is the first of the Tarzan novels, a series Burroughs continued into the 1940s.

An English couple, John and Alice Clayton, Lord and Lady Greystoke, are marooned in the coastal jungle of equatorial Africa in 1888. Their son is born there, his mother dies of illness within a year, and his father is killed by the king of the apes after the boy's adoption by Kala, a she-ape who has lost her own child. Tarzan, as the apes name him, grows up physically weaker than those around him but far quicker, discovers the cabin his parents left behind, and teaches himself to read English from the picture primers in it, though he has never heard the language spoken.

He hunts, learns the danger of the jungle's predators and makes uneasy friends among them, and finds his place in the tribe by killing the ape that has long threatened him. The arrival of white travellers on the coast puts him face to face with the people he resembles and cannot speak to.