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Interests

Tarzan

Edgar Rice Burroughs
Year read: approximately 1956, my age, approximately 15

I read several Tarzan books, perhaps five of the twenty-two Burroughs wrote. I do not remember exactly which these were, but I do remember that the first one, Tarzan of the Apes, was not one of them. That was all that were in print at the time, and they were not carried by the Great Neck Library. (Apparently many libraries did not carry them. They were thought of as trash.) In the 1960s all of them were republished in paperback and became big best sellers for a while, but I discovered that by then I could no longer read them. These were among the first books I read all the way through on my own. I was impressed by Tarzan's amorality, and by the intricate structures of the subplots of the books. I diagramed the plots of one of the books and showed it to my mother, who suggested I might become a contemporary literary critic.

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