Tarzan (John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke) is a fictional character, a feral child raised in the Congo Basin by the Mangani great apes; he later experiences civilization, only to reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer.
Tarzan, the creation of the American novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, first appeared in a magazine story in 1912. His popularity led to the publication of a novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1914), and to a series of successful sequels reported to have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.