Elie Berthet (1818-1891) was a 19th century French novelist. His works include L'enfant des bois (1865) (as The Wild Man of the Woods, 1868), and The Pre-Historic World (1876; translated into English by Mary J. Safford in 1879) and La Bete du Gevaudan (1858), a novel about a famous feral child. He is viewed as an influence on the development of the genre of "ape-man" fiction that ultimately led to the creation of Tarzan.