List of Fictional Feral Children - in Modern Prose

In Modern Prose

An early modern example of a feral child comes from Rudyard Kipling's 1894 novel The Jungle Book. His protagonist, Mowgli, is raised by wolves and becomes the ruler of the jungle.

Peter Pan, created by J. M. Barrie in 1902, is a boy who fled to the magical Neverland and refused to grow up.

The Blue Lagoon (1908) tells the story of two children stranded on a deserted tropical island.

Tarzan (1912), raised by apes, has become an iconic hero of novels, comic strips, and motion pictures.

Shasta of the Wolves (1919) by Olaf Baker, in which a Native American boy is raised by a wolfpack in the Pacific Northwest.

Jungle Born (1924) by John Eyton, in which a boy raised by rhesus macaque's in northern India inadvertently saves a teenage girl from her abusive father.

In Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised by Martians on Mars, as he returns to Earth in early adulthood. The novel explores his interaction with — and eventual transformation of — human culture.

In Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's 1971 novel The Little One (also known as Space Mowgly), a human from Earth, Piere Semyonov, has been raised by an alien non-humanoid civilization after his parents' spaceship crashed onto an uncharted planet. After his discovery by the Terran scientists, several attempts to integrate him back to human society were undertaken, but all were in vain.

The theme of young adolescent runaways seeking shelter with wild animals and learning their ways is seen in novels such as the Newbery Medal-winning novel Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George (1972).

Ursula K. Le Guin's Hugo-winning short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (1973) tells of the title community, a beautiful, happy and prosperous city that nevertheless exists only as long as, somewhere within, a child is kept in conditions of appalling physical and psychological neglect.

Philip Jose Farmer's anthology Mother Was A Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology, Fiction And Fact About Humans Raised By Animals (1974) collects several stories of fictional feral children.

Jane Yolen's Passager (1996), the first of the Young Merlin trilogy of short novels, depicts a slightly more realistic view of such childhood. Abandoned in a Welsh forest at the age of seven years, the boy who will become Merlin lives in the forest for a year nearly as well as its natives, until a falconer who is used to domesticating animals captures him and begins the long and difficult task of educating him in human behavior.

In Karen Hesse's The Music of Dolphins (1996), a young girl called Mila is found after having been raised by dolphins for over a decade. In the book, Mila is taken to a clinic with other undomesticated human young, none of whom adapt to main-stream humanity as easily as she does. At the end of the book, Mila returns to the dolphin pod, showing her rejection of human society.

In the series starting with Through Wolf's Eyes (2001) by author Jane Lindskold, a young girl's family and colony are killed by a fire, and she is the only survivor. She is then taken in by the "Royal Wolves" who speak their own language with gestures and signals. Because Firekeeper had already learned a human language before going to live with the wolves, she was able to return to human society and became a valuable asset to the royalty, but she found that humans were not as noble as the wolves she loved as family. It is her greatest wish to become a wolf herself and leave the humans behind again.

Wild Angel (2001) by Pat Murphy tells the story of a young girl raised by wolves from the age of four in gold-rush-era California.

World War Z by Max Brooks contain many references to feral children - in this case, children who were separated from normal humanity at some point during the zombie war, and were forced to live in the wild, contending not just with the problems of survival but also the hazard posed by the walking dead. The novel suggests they formed a kind of rudimentary social or "pack" structure with basic tool-using abilities, and in most cases were capable of being slowly rehabilitated.

In the 2006 book Dogboy by Victor Kelleher, a young boy is abandoned at birth by his mother and is raised by a half domestic dog in a litter of puppies. He is later bought back to a nearby human settlement by the dog, searching for a home with her owner once again, and her only surviving pup but is rejected as an abomination.

Camilla Way's 2008 novel Little Bird concerns a girl kidnapped as a toddler by a mute and held captive until the age of twelve.

In 2009 Eva Hornung's novel Dogboy, set in Moscow, tells the story of two feral children who live with a pack of dogs. One of the children was abandoned at the age of 4 and the other is brought to the lair, as a baby, by the dominant female in the pack. The children eventually come under the notice of two scientists working in a centre that rehabilitates abandoned children.

The Dictator's Moustaches, a 2009 Italian novel by Anna Russo concerns an abandoned baby rescued and brought up by dogs.

Magic Hour by Kristin Hannah concerns a young girl who appears out of the forest, with no information as to her origins. She is called 'wolf girl'; she is cared for and eventually loved by fallen psychologist Julia.

In The Fall, a 2011 Norwegian post-apocalyptic novel by Jan Henrik Nielsen, one of the main characters is a boy who calls himself Bird. The two main characters of the book, the sisters Nanna and Fride, meet him when they search for medicine in an abandoned city. Bird has lived alone and raised himself, living on food he has found and learning to speak from audio-books.