Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke

Cover of the Bison Books (2006) edition of Tarzan Alive.

Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1972) is a fictional biography by Philip José Farmer. It presents the life story of Edgar Rice Burroughs' literary hero Tarzan as if he were a real person.

The book is written on the premise that Tarzan was an actual person with original author Burroughs having written highly fictionalized memoirs for him. Farmer is then telling the "real story". Farmer examines the psychological make up of John Clayton (Tarzan's real name in the novels) and his peers, based on close readings of the various Burroughs books, accepting some of Burroughs' concepts and rejecting others in an attempt at greater verisimilitude. Among his conceits is that, since the apes described by Burroughs had a spoken language that Tarzan learned, these animals must have been "pithecanthropoids": "a group of rare hominids who are probably now extinct" and "not great apes".

The most recent edition of Tarzan Alive includes a foreword by Win Scott Eckert and an introduction by Mike Resnick.

The text of Tarzan Alive links the characters from the Tarzan mythos to dozens of other fictional literary characters as members of Farmer's "Wold Newton family".

Editions

• Hardback:
  • Doubleday (1972)
• Softcover reprints:
  • Popular Library (1973 & 1976)
  • Panther Books (1974, reprinted 1975)
  • Playboy (1981)
• Revised edition:
  • Bison Books (2006), Foreword by Win Scott Eckert; Introduction by Mike Resnick; Artwork by Jean-Paul Goude; ISBN 0-8032-6921-8, softcover, 312 pp.

See also

• Philip José Farmer bibliography, for other Tarzan-related Farmer works
• Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), another Farmer "fictional biography"

External links

• Google Books preview: Farmer, Philip José (1972). Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke. Bison Books.  ISBN 0-8032-6921-8
• Summary of Tarzan Alive
• An Expansion of Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe