"Men were indeed more foolish and more cruel than the beasts of the jungle! " Tarzan of the Apes is a 1912 novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. The story follows Tarzan's adventures, from his childhood being raised by apes in the jungle to his eventual encounters with other humans and Western society. So popular was the character that Burroughs continued the series into the 1940s with two dozen sequels.