Who Was the “Fictional” Hero After All?
Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” was published in 1894, years before Tarzan, and featured Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. And critics weren’t the only ones who accused Burroughs of stealing the idea. Kipling himself once blamed Burroughs of jazzing up the Mowgli story to make Tarzan a hit. But like a good book, the plot in this story thickens.
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As it turns out, Kipling (and the others) might have been wrong all along. Well, at least partially. It seems as though Burroughs might have hidden his real inspiration for his “fictional” hero. And it also wouldn’t be the first time a writer based an iconic character on a real person (take Winnie the Pooh and Cristopher Robin, for example).