Tarzan the Untamed.

New York: Grosset & Dunlap,, [1934]. A family copy, intimately inscribed by Burroughs with an original poem Presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his daughter on the front free endpaper: "Dear Joan - I wish that I might here indite / Something witty, something bright / But when God installed my brain / He put in something else again. Papa". Joan Burroughs (1908-1972) and her father were especially close. When she was young, she would often interrupt her father's writing, and in 1918 he recalled how Joan would often intrude on him with her doll, "Helen": "now comes Joan with Helen in one hand and Helen's severed arm in another, strewing a thin line of sawdust across my study floor. I may be in the midst of a thrilling passage - Tarzan may be pulling a tiger out of Africa by the tail - but when Joan comes even Tarzan pauses, and he stays paused until I have tied Helen's arm to her torso once again for the hundredth time" (quoted in Fenton, p. 74). Burroughs would often read drafts of his novels aloud to his family, whose reaction to the present novel prevented the author from killing off Jane as he had planned, and forced him to restore her in the sequel, Tarzan the Terrible. Joan grew up to form her own connection to the Tarzan series: in 1928, she married actor James Pierce, who starred as the jungle hero in the silent film Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927); Burroughs remarked at the time that "if you would like to see the personification of Tarzan of the Apes as I visualize him, see the film Tarzan and the Golden Lion with Mr. James Pierce as Tarzan". The couple later acted together as Tarzan and Jane in the first Tarzan radio series in 1932-4. Burroughs inscribed copies of most of his novels to Joan, and before it was dispersed her collection included over 30 presentations copies of her father's works. Tarzan the Untamed is the seventh novel in the Tarzan series. The novel was first published in serial form in Red Book Magazine and the All-Story Weekly in 1919-20, and in book form in 1920 by A. C. McClurg; it was reprinted several times in the following two decades, and the present copy dates to 1934, with the terminal advertisements listing 33 novels by Burroughs. Octavo. Original red cloth, spine and front cover lettered in black, top edge green. With dust jacket. Frontispiece and 3 plates by J. Allen St. John. A few nicks to spine ends, small marginal stains to pp. 64-5, contents otherwise clean; jacket slightly rubbed, lightly nicked at extremities, flaps without price, as issued: a very good copy in near-fine dust jacket. Zeuschner 772. Robert W. Fenton, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan: A Biography of the Author and His Creation, 2015.