Tarzan Universe

Deep in a jungle no map has tamed, an English lord's orphaned son is suckled by a she-ape and grows to manhood knowing neither his name nor his kind. He is Tarzan — John Clayton, Lord Greystoke — and the wilderness answers to him alone. When Edgar Rice Burroughs loosed him on the world in 1912, he opened a country that has never since closed. Burroughs's own two dozen novels are its spine, carrying the ape-man from the treetops of his boyhood to the gold-vaults of Opar — that lost Atlantean colony where the priestess La keeps her rites — and out across a continent thick with forgotten races, sunken cities, and dinosaur-haunted plateaus. Later hands widened the map. Philip José Farmer gave the ape-man a mock-biography, then dug beneath Opar to its deep-prehistoric root, the drowned empire of Khokarsa, in Hadon of Ancient Opar — a saga continued by Christopher Paul Carey. The authorized Wild Adventures of Tarzan line looses him against fresh terrors, and the boldest tales fling him clear off the Earth toward Burroughs's own red Mars. What binds it all is the pulse Burroughs struck: clean, headlong adventure, exotic and unashamed, half jungle-romance and half lost-world reverie, forever circling one question — what is a man once you strip the drawing-room away? Newcomers need no chart. Begin where the world begins, with Tarzan of the Apes, and follow Burroughs's novels in the order he wrote them; the story runs truest along its own vine. Opar and Khokarsa wait below for the reader who would descend into the older, darker heart of the myth.