Jane Goodall, the late-trailblazing primatologist and global conservation icon, has repeatedly said she was inspired by the book Tarzan of the Apes series growing up, influencing her profound career.
Goodall has said many times during public talks and in print that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 book inspired her anthropological work, saying that “my Tarzan was the Tarzan of my imagination as I read this book.” The Disney film, Tarzan, which popularized the story, didn’t come out until 1999.
“Of course, little girls of 10 can be very romantic, and I fell passionately in love with this Lord of the Jungle,” adding, “and what did Tarzan do? He married the wrong Jane,” she said in reference to Jane Porter, the main woman in the story, and not herself. Porter is a fictional character in Tarzan, who is from Baltimore, Maryland, and the daughter of a professor.
In Goodall’s book, Reason for Hope: Spiritual Journey (2000), she wrote, “I think I went through all the Tarzan books thirty feet or so above the ground. I was madly in love with the Lord of the Jungle, terribly jealous of his Jane.”
She continued, “It was daydreaming about life in the forest with Tarzan that led to my determination to go to Africa, to live with animals and write books about them. I also went up Beech simply to be myself, to think.
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