appeared in The All-Story in October 1912. The All-Story published it in its entirety in installments, and it was published in 1914 as a novel. Though The Jungle Book is sometimes cited as an influence on Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, he claimed that his only inspiration was the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus. Rudyard Kipling commented that Burroughs "had 'jazzed' the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, thoroughly enjoyed himself." Major themes Recent literary criticism often focuses on the identity of the eponymous protagonist of Tarzan of the Apes. Literary scholars, such as Jeff Berglund, Mikko Tuhkanen, J. Michelle Coughlan, Bijana Oklopčić, and Catherine Jurca have examined the overlapping themes of Tarzan's heredity, race, civilized behavior, sexuality, and escapist appeal. Writers in popular culture, such as Gore Vidal, often emphasize Tarzan's escapist appeal. Heredity Burroughs himself acknowledged the centrality of the theme of heredity in the novel, and its conflict with the environment. According to his biographer, John Taliaferro, he claimed in a Writer’s Digest, "I was mainly interested in playing with the idea of a contest between heredity and environment. For this purpose I selected an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort, and at an age at which he could not have been influenced by association with creatures of his own kind I threw him into an environment as diametrically opposite that to which he had been born as I might well conceive". The scholar Jeff Burglund notices that although Tarzan was brought up in the jungle far from other humans, he is inexplicably drawn back to his parents’ cabin and the objects which he finds there. He discovers a capacity for gentlemanly behavior around Jane despite no one teaching it to him. Although the African tribes which he fights practice cannibalism, he suddenly feels revulsion when he considers eating one of the African men he kills. When he refuses to eat the African, Burroughs portrays "hereditary instinct" as the reason. Tarzan's genetic association with upper-class, Western civilization conditions his actions more than his violent environment, and Berglund claims that Tarzan could represent the stereotypical "scion of English stock" in colonialized countries. His racial superiority manifests itself through his behavior because it correlates with the ideals of Western civilization, whether he treats a woman politely or cannot force himself to eat an African man. Racism