Tarzan Alive [antikvár]

FOREWORDThis is a biography of a living person.It should, therefore, be placed by librarians and booksellers on the 'B' shelves. It should be subtitled in the catalog cards as The Life of Lord Greystoke, from 1888 through 1946.Some might object that, since the book is also a quest for the identity of the real Tarzan, it could be put into the category of 'mystery.' Others might object that, since it is based on a semifictional series written by a novelist, it should be classified as 'fiction.' However, this book makes a serious attempt to fill in the gaps left by Burroughs and to explain the seeming discrepancies in his works on 'Lord Greystoke.' It tries to cull the fictional, the impossible, and the improbable from the works by Burroughs. The residue, I trust, presents a fairly accurate picture of the life and times of the very real Englishman who spent his youth among a group of rare hominids who are probably now extinct. Hominids are subhumans, not great apes, and it was a band of language-using pithecanthropoids who adopted the human infant called Tarzan. Burroughs, who based his early novels of Tarzan on incomplete and sometimes inaccurate data, described the 'mangani' as great apes and was thereafter stuck with that term. Not that he minded. He was writing novels, and the facts did not always have to be adhered to. Indeed, as I will be demonstrating more than once, he sometimes went out of his way to make sure that the reader thought that his Tarzan books were entirely fictionalI propose to show that Tarzan is not at all the persona we've seen in so many bad movies about him. I propose to show that he is not quite the persona that Burroughs wrote about, though his character, or temperament, is essentially the same. Burroughs did, however, exaggerate some things for romantic purposes. Thus, the physical prowess of Tarzan, while undoubtedly superior to that of any other living being.