Tarzan of the Apes

A boy who taught himself to read

In 1888 an English lord and his wife are put ashore by mutineers on the west coast of Africa. They build a cabin, and their son is born there. When the parents die, the baby is taken by Kala, a female ape, who raises him as her own. Tarzan grows up stronger and cleverer than the apes around him. Then, in the cabin, he finds his parents’ books, a primer and children’s readers among them, and slowly, with no teacher at all, he works out what the “little bugs” on the page mean. By eighteen he is, as Burroughs puts it, “an English lordling, who could speak no English, and yet who could read and write his native language.” Edgar Rice Burroughs first published the story in a magazine in 1912.

Why it works for learners

Any language learner will feel for Tarzan in those chapters. Beyond them, the book is pure adventure: fights, chases and rescues, told in a direct, energetic style. The vocabulary of the jungle (tree, vine, river, lion, ape, spear, rope, hut) is concrete and repeats. When a party of strangers arrives from the outside world, including a young American woman, Jane Porter, the book becomes a comedy of manners as well. Modern readers will notice that its portrayal of Africans reflects the racism of 1912.

Which level to start at

B1 is a good start; the action is easy to follow and the plot moves quickly. A2 works for a first adventure. Readers at B2 and up will catch more of Burroughs’s irony about civilization and its manners.

Read next

• The Jungle Book, Kipling’s boy raised by wolves
• A Princess of Mars, Burroughs’s other famous hero, from the same year
• Robinson Crusoe, another life built from scratch on a lonely shore