The precedents of Tarzan Alive fall into two categories: previous fictional biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, and postmodernist experiments in metafiction. First, Farmer has often acknowledged the influence of W. S. Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962) on his own versions of fictional biography. As well, in his introduction to "An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke," he refers to a series of "splendid examples" of this subgenre, including Cyril Northcote Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower (1970) and George MacDonald Fraser's better known Flashman novels, supposedly the memoirs of a character in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1856). These and other fictional biographies have in common an attempt to remain faithful to the letter and spirit of the original while "correcting" discrepancies, filling in gaps, and generating new theories. Farmer describes this process as "a lot of fun and hard work," and he clearly enjoys playing...