They had passed but a short distance to the rear of Numa when the boy caught the unpleasant odor of the carnivore. His face lighted with a smile. Something told him that he would have known that scent among a myriad of others even if Akut had not told him that a lion lay near. There was a strange familiarity-a weird familiarity in it that made the short hairs rise at the nape of his neck, and brought his upper lip into an involuntary snarl that bared his fighting fangs.... He was, upon the instant, another creature-wary, alert, ready. Thus did the scent of Numa, the lion, transform the boy into a beast. Edgar Rice Burroughs created one of the most iconic figures in American pop culture, Tarzan of the Apes, and it is impossible to overstate his influence on entire genres of popular literature in the decades after his enormously winning pulp novels stormed the public's imagination. The Son of Tarzan, first published in 1917, is the fourth book in Burroughs' tales of the ape-man. Here, Tarzan's young son, Jack Clayton, escaping kidnappers, flees from London to the jungle of Africa, and the boy raised in civilization learns to live among the beasts to become Korak the Killer, a mighty warrior. American novelist EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS (1875-1950) wrote dozens of adventure, crime, and science fiction novels that are still beloved today, including Tarzan of the Apes (1912), At the Earth's Core (1914), A Princess of Mars (1917), The Land That Time Forgot (1924), and Pirates of Venus (1934). He is reputed to have been reading a comic book when he died.