Although The One and Only Ivan is a fictional story, some characters and events from the novel are based on the true story of a gorilla named Ivan.
Born in 1962, Ivan was a western lowland gorilla who, along with his sibling, was captured from the wilds of the Democratic Republic of Congo while still in infancy. After being brought to the United States, Ivan and his sibling were sold to the owners of a department store in Tacoma, Washington. During the transportation, Ivan's sister died.
Ivan was raised as a household pet. However, by the age of five, Ivan grew too large to live in a human's home. He was moved to an enclosure at the department store.
For the next two decades, Ivan was a star attraction for the mall. In the early nineties, a National Geographic special feature about Ivan led to public outcry. Meanwhile, the mall was facing bankruptcy. In 1994, the mall owner donated Ivan to Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. The next year he was transferred to Zoo Atlanta, which had developed a reputation for successfully breeding captive gorillas. In Atlanta, Ivan, for the first time in nearly thirty years, experienced the outdoors. Though he was introduced to female mates, Ivan never conceived offspring.
Ivan the gorilla died in the summer of 2012 at the age of fifty. In the dense forests where Ivan was born, poaching and disease have continued to reduce the western lowland gorilla’s population numbers by more than 60% in the past two decades.
