Tarzan (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke) is a fictional character, a feral child raised in the African jungle by the Mangani great apes; he later experiences civilization, only to reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer.

She, her father, and others of their party are marooned on the same coastal jungle area where Tarzan's human parents were 20 years earlier.

His strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes, and swimming skills are extraordinary; he has wrestled not just full-grown apes, but also gorillas, lions, rhinos, crocodiles, pythons, leopards, sharks, tigers, giant seahorses, and even dinosaurs (when he visited Pellucidar).

Tarzan is a skilled tracker, and uses his exceptional hearing and keen sense of smell to follow prey or avoid predators.

[7] He can communicate with many species of jungle animals, and has been shown to be a skilled impressionist, able to mimic the sound of a gunshot perfectly.

His literacy is self-taught after several years in his early teens by visiting the log cabin of his infancy and looking at children's primer/picture books.

The characters are often said to be two-dimensional, the dialogue wooden, and the storytelling devices (such as excessive reliance on coincidence) strain credulity.

"[12] Critical reception grew more positive with the 1981 study by Erling B. Holtsmark, Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature.

Burroughs's melodramatic situations and the elaborate details he works into his fictional world, such as his construction of a partial language for his great apes, appeal to a worldwide fan base.

The most notable example in the United States was a series of five novels by the pseudonymous "Barton Werper" that appeared 1964–65 by Gold Star Books (part of Charlton Comics).

In Farmer's fictional universe, Tarzan, along with Doc Savage and Sherlock Holmes, are the cornerstones of the Wold Newton family.

A Feast Unknown is somewhat infamous among Tarzan and Doc Savage fans for its graphic violence and sexual content.

Starting with Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 through twelve films until 1948, the franchise was anchored by former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller in the title role.

The Weintraub productions portray a Tarzan that is closer to Burroughs's original concept in the novels: a jungle lord who speaks grammatical English and is well educated and familiar with civilization.

From the mid-1950s, all the extant sound Tarzan films became staples of Saturday morning television aimed at young and teenaged viewers.

The program did not sell, but a different live action Tarzan series produced by Sy Weintraub and starring Ron Ely ran on NBC from 1966 to 1968.

This depiction of Tarzan is a well-educated bachelor who grew tired of urban civilization and is in his native African jungle once again.

In between the two productions with Lara, Tarzán (1991–1994), a half-hour syndicated series in which Tarzan is portrayed as a blond environmentalist, with Jane turned into a French ecologist.

The latest television series was the short-lived live-action Tarzan (2003), which starred male model Travis Fimmel and updated the setting to contemporary New York City, with Jane as a police detective, played by Sarah Wayne Callies.

Saturday Night Live featured recurring sketches with the speech-impaired trio of "Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein's Monster".

Over the years, many artists have drawn the Tarzan comic strip, notably Burne Hogarth, Russ Manning, and Mike Grell.

Jerry Siegel named Tarzan and another Burroughs character, John Carter, as early inspirations for his creation of Superman.

Of these characters the most popular was Ki-Gor, the subject of 59 novels that appeared between winter 1939 to spring 1954 in the magazine Jungle Stories.

Bederman does note that Tarzan, "an instinctively chivalrous Anglo-Saxon," does not engage in sexual violence, renouncing his "masculine impulse to rape."

"[33] According to Bederman, despite Tarzan embodying all the tropes of white supremacy espoused or rejected by the people she had reviewed (Theodore Roosevelt, G. Stanley Hall, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B.

Instead, Bederman writes that Burroughs proves her point because, in telling racist and sexist stories whose protagonist boasted of killing black people, he was not being unusual at all, but was instead just being a typical 1912 White American.

[34] The early books give a pervasively negative and stereotypical portrayal of native Africans, including Arabs.

In The Return of Tarzan, Arabs are "surly looking" and call Christians "dogs", while black Africans are "lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering".

[36] Burroughs's opinions, manifested through the narrative voice in the stories, reflect common Western attitudes in his time, which in a 21st-century context would be considered racist and sexist.

[37] Following the battle, Burroughs (p. 178) states:[37]To entertain Tarzan and to show him what great strides civilization had taken—the son of The First Woman seized a female by the hair and dragging her to him struck her heavily about the head and face with his clenched fist, and the woman fell upon her knees and fondled his legs, looking wistfully into his face, her own glowing with love and admiration.While Burroughs depicts some female characters with humanistic equalizing elements, Torgovnick argues that violent scenes against women in the context of male political and social domination are condoned in his writing, reinforcing a notion of gendered hierarchy where patriarchy is portrayed as the natural pinnacle of society.