Transpacific Tarzan: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Japanese Internment, and America's Pacific War

Abstract: This article examines the American novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs's writings on Japan, Japanese Americans, and Japanese internment during World War II. Best known as the creator of Tarzan, Burroughs was one of the most widely read novelists in early twentieth-century America. While living in Hawai'i in the 1940s, he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and later wrote about Japan and Japanese Americans in essays, correspondence, and a surprising Tarzan sequel in which Burroughs's iconic hero battles the Japanese Empire. This article explores how the transpacific turn in Burroughs's late career brought the questions of race and empire that famously figured in the original Tarzan novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1912), into dialogue with the rise of American power in the Pacific.