The first and best of the Tarzan novels, of which Edgar Rice Burroughs eventually wrote several dozen, Tarzan of the Apes remains one of the signature stories of American popular literature, as readable as it is famous. Tarzan himself, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, is “the best known character in the whole of fiction.” As John Taliaferro asserts in his Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic, “There is no question that [Tarzan of the Apes] is one of the most entertaining and exemplary books of the last century. . . . [It] is not merely a story from a bygone era; it is a tale as old as time, and for all time, too.” “[Burroughs has] a gift very few writers of any kind possess: he can describe action vividly.” —Gore Vidal