In grade five, Farmer first began reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan novels, a discovery which so impressed him that his school friends were soon calling him "Tarzan" because of his fondness for climbing trees and swinging from branch to branch. As well, Farmer also has a large collection of pulp fiction dating back to the 1920s, including original editions of Burroughs's novels. Clearly, then, Tarzan Alive was written as the result of a lifelong fascination with a figure Farmer describes as "Nature's last creation of a Golden Age man," and not as a direct response to specific social conditions.

Nevertheless, the fact that Farmer found a receptive audience for the nine Tarzan-related titles he published from 1969-1976 is no coincidence. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of social history during which many people, particularly young people, were intensely distrustful of the "establishment," as...