Tarzan might not be “real” in a historical sense, but he is an immortal character whose story makes the reader think, wonder, and take delight. That’s reason enough to celebrate his creator in his sesquicentennial year.

2025 marks the 150^th anniversary of the birth of the great modern mythmaker Edgar Rice Burroughs—creator of Tarzan, Mars explorer John Carter, and other figures. Though there have been some notices of the famed writer’s life, the celebration on a broad scale seems to be muted. That’s likely because Burroughs was a child of his time, embracing some of the scientific racism and its corollary, eugenics, that was afloat.

I’ve only read his first book about the swinger of vines, so I cannot judge how far he went in such beliefs. While Tarzan of the Apes certainly betrays belief in the superiority of European peoples, it also champions judgment of individuals as individuals. After finding out about his identity as Lord Greystoke and becoming a celebrity, Monsieur Tarzan, as the French refer to him, answers a question about the character of lions by declining to stereotype the lion as either “an arrant coward” or a truly brave beast. He answers to the variety of different lions with reference to variety among humans: “But one might as well judge all blacks by the fellow who ran amuck last week, or decide that all whites are cowards, because one has met a cowardly white.” And if the Frenchmen did not get the point, he caps it off by saying, “There is as much individuality among the lower orders, gentlemen, as there is among ourselves.”

In fact, Burroughs depicts the savagery of cannibalistic tribes as motivated in part by “the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State—a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe.” While scholars today debate the demonization of Leopold as it has been handed down and, especially, popularized by Adam Hochschild’s book Leopold’s Ghost, my point is that Burroughs had no problem attributing savagery to whites.[*]

It is better to think of Burroughs as an impressive human being and a writer of imagination capable of creating indelible figures and exploring questions of what it means to be human. That Burroughs is impressive should be beyond doubt. A cowboy, a miner, a worker of various jobs, Burroughs decided to write at the age of 36 after having seen what else was being published in the pulp magazines. He recalled thinking that, “if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines,… I could write stories just as rotten.” Despite having never written a single story, he started and never really stopped. By his death in 1950, he had written eighty novels. Even more impressive, in his late sixties, Burroughs became one of the oldest war correspondents to report during World War II.

That he created at least one everlasting literary creature is obvious. Friends tell me I need to read John Carter novels for another, but I can say at least that Tarzan, about whom Burroughs wrote twenty novels, is not just a character in novels but a character in popular imagination. In “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” Chesterton wrote of “true romantic trash” that it was an ever-fruitful font of stories: “There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.” The Tarzan novels may taste of the intellectual soil of their time, but the character is himself an immortal. Far more than the Avenging Nine or Dick Deadshot, Tarzan still inhabits the cultural mind as much as does Robin Hood.

In part, Tarzan lives on because his very situation is an archetype that enables us to ask questions about what it is to be Man: can the one born to the great but raised in humble circumstances still be great? Even setting aside the “scientific racism” question, the debates about nature and nurture will always be with us. In Tarzan’s case, the humble circumstances are pretty extreme: he is raised by literal apes. This raises the stakes. Is it possible to live without human socialization? Or, the rather boyish question of whether man, puny among the beasts, would be able to be lord of the jungle without his technology?

The general question about greatness amid humble origins is, I think, possible to be answered in the affirmative. Nature often allows people to overcome nurture in their lives. Given a strength of will, great figures can come from slums while slimeballs and weaklings can come from the best and the most advantaged families.

Whether such a noble nature could be perfected despite a lack of human society is a question that must be answered in the negative. Every story we have had of children surviving outside of human society shows that the capacity to develop language and other skills requires other human beings. More remarkable than the supposed superhuman strength Tarzan gains—with technology no more sophisticated than a knife, he can kill beasts and attain to the lordship of the apes—is Burroughs’s description of Tarzan teaching himself language.

In the story, Tarzan discovers the little cabin where his parents had settled and died, leaving the infant Lord Greystoke to be taken in by an ape mother whose own child had died. Finding books, he discovers images that seem to mean something. An illustrated dictionary allows him to figure out symbolic representation. He figures out not merely that symbols are connected to things, but that the very “little bugs” (letters) can be arranged in different formations to mean different things. By his own investigations, he learns both to read and write so well that upon the arrival of the infamous Jane, he can leave an eloquent message for her, signing his own name “Tarzan.”

The whole Tarzan myth really puts a pause on the “willing suspension of disbelief” Samuel Taylor Coleridge said was necessary for a reader. And yet if one can crank up that suspension a bit, one can delight in a man swinging from vine to vine, often while carrying other adults, for miles through a jungle. Just as the possibility of feral children attaining to their natural nobility without other people is false, so, too, is the idea of human strength being nurtured amongst the apes such that one could defeat them. But the reader can pass over these.

This brings us to an aspect of literary creation that has not been mentioned yet. Even if some questions raised about being human must be answered in the negative, it is immensely fun to imagine a situation in which it were otherwise. We are creatures who delight in what is not, perhaps in part because we know that there are realities that we will all encounter that go beyond present limitations. Christians understand that even some of the limitations we seemingly face now are not absolute. God, St. Paul says, “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.”

Tarzan might not be “real” in a historical sense, but he is an immortal character whose story makes the reader think, wonder, and take delight. That’s reason enough to celebrate his creator in his sesquicentennial year.

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[*] For a wholesale criticism of Hochschild and a retelling of the facts, see Bruce Gilley, “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” The American Conservative, April 17, 2023.

The featured image is an illustration by James Allen St. John for Tarzan and the Golden Lion by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.