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, one of the best-known and most durable figures of popular fiction, the hero of jungle adventures in nearly 30 novels and dozens of motion pictures. Tarzan, the creation of the American novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, first appeared in a magazine story in 1912.