[1] The story follows the title character Tarzan's adventures, from his childhood being raised by apes in the jungle to his eventual encounters with other humans and Western society.

[2] Scholars have noted several important themes in the novel: the impact of heredity on behavior; racial superiority; civilization, especially as Tarzan struggles with his identity as a human; sexuality; and escapism.

John and Alice (Rutherford) Clayton, Viscount and Lady Greystoke from England, are marooned in the western coastal jungles of equatorial Africa in 1888.

Avenging himself on the killer, Tarzan begins an antagonistic relationship with the tribe, raiding its village for weapons and practicing cruel pranks on them.

Tarzan's cousin, William Cecil Clayton, unwitting usurper of the ape man's ancestral English estate, is also among the party.

Meanwhile, clues from his parents' cabin have enabled D'Arnot to prove Tarzan's true identity as John Clayton II, the Earl of Greystoke.

[5] He worked as a U.S. cavalryman, a gold miner in Oregon, a cowboy in Idaho, a railroad policeman in Salt Lake City, and an owner of several failed businesses.

[6] He decided to write his own pulp fiction after being disappointed by the reading material others offered, and worked in that capacity for four years before his first novel, Tarzan of the Apes, was published.

[1] Though The Jungle Book is sometimes cited as an influence on Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, he claimed that his only inspiration was the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus.

Literary scholars, such as Jeff Berglund, Mikko Tuhkanen, J. Michelle Coughlan, Bijana Oklopčić, and Catherine Jurca have examined the overlapping themes of Tarzan's heredity, race, civilized behavior, sexuality, and escapist appeal.

For this purpose I selected an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort, and at an age at which he could not have been influenced by association with creatures of his own kind I threw him into an environment as diametrically opposite that to which he had been born as I might well conceive".

[9] The scholar Jeff Burglund notices that although Tarzan was brought up in the jungle far from other humans, he is inexplicably drawn back to his parents’ cabin and the objects which he finds there.

[13] His racial superiority manifests itself through his behavior because it correlates with the ideals of Western civilization, whether he treats a woman politely or cannot force himself to eat an African man.

She claims that Tarzan represents white, male opposition to the "black rapist" stereotype which was prevalent in the Southern U.S. at the time of its publication because the language which describes apes parallels propaganda against people of Sub-Saharan African descent.

[14] Catherine Jurca similarly analyzes Tarzan as opposed to tolerating the presence of people of other races and classes in favor of preserving his own culture.

The way that Tarzan defends his corner of civilization, his parents’ home, from the "savages" who want to destroy it, reflects an early twentieth-century American attitude; as darker-skinned immigrants flooded the country, especially urban areas, white Americans feared that their culture would be destroyed by newcomers who did not understand or care about it, and tried to protect the suburbs in the same way that Tarzan tries to protect his home.

[6] According to Gore Vidal, when Burroughs was unsatisfied with reality, "he consoled himself with an inner world where he was strong and handsome, adored by beautiful women and worshipped by exotic races.

[15] "In the eyes of contemporary man, huddled in large cities and frustrated by a restrictive civilization, Tarzan was a joyous symbol of primitivism, an affirmation of life, endowing the reader with a Promethean sense of power.

Dynamite Entertainment adapted the story for the first six issues of Lord of the Jungle, albeit loosely; for example, the cannibal tribe was replaced by a village of literal apemen.