Synopsis
Before Adam is Jack London’s fictional tour de force. In it, he brilliantly recreates the dawn of humanity, depicting the prehistoric world as a place of dark conflict where only the fittest will survive. Tormented by a succession of terrifying dreams, the narrator is faced with the strange truth that his consciousness has become entwined with that of Big-Tooth, his mid-Pleistocene ancestor. Through these dream memories, he witnesses Big-Tooth’s life as one of the “Folk” race—a life without developed language, social structure, or fire. He sees, too, the Folk’s fierce battles for survival against the more advanced Fire People and the primitive Tree People. As he struggles to make sense of Big-Tooth’s world, he begins questioning the very notion of eugenics, making Before Adam one of the most pertinent works of its time. American writer Jack London is the author of some of the finest naturalistic adventure stories of the 20th century, most memorably The Call of the Wild.
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About Jack London
J
Jack London
1876–1916
John Griffith London (born John Griffith Chaney; January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first writers to become a worldwide celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. His most famous works include *The Call of the Wild* and *White Fang*, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay", and "The Heathen". London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, workers' rights, socialism, and eugenics. He wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé *The People of the Abyss*, *The War of the Classes*, and *Before Adam*. **Source**: [Jack London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London) on Wikipedia.
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