John Clayton, the orphaned son of an English aristocratic couple marooned on the west coast of Africa, is raised by the great apes and becomes Tarzan. His self-education from the books left in his parents’ cabin leads to a first encounter with Europeans and Americans, including Jane Porter, and forces him to decide how far he belongs to the human world.
The adventure unfolds during the age of European colonial expansion in Africa, with steamship travel, aristocratic inheritance and transatlantic movement placing Tarzan's story firmly in the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Burroughs's jungle societies are imaginative creations, but the surrounding assumptions about empire, exploration and race reflect the period in which the novel was conceived.
