Before Adam

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.