Tarzan alive

Blurb

Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke is a fictional biography by Philip José Farmer, presenting the life story of Edgar Rice Burroughs' literary hero Tarzan as if he were a real person. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1972, with a paperback edition following from Popular Library in 1973 and a trade paperback edition from Bison Books in April 2006. The first British edition was published by Panther in May 1974.
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 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".