Before Adam is a novel by Jack London, serialized in 1906 and 1907 in Everybody's Magazine. It is the story of a boy who dreams he lives the life of an early hominid Australopithecine. The story offers an early view of human evolution. The majority of the story is told through the eyes of the boy's hominid alter ego, one of the Cave People. In addition to the Cave People, there are the more advanced Fire People, and the more animal-like Tree People. Other characters include the hominid's father, a love interest, and Red-Eyes, a fierce being that rules the Cave People. A sabre-cat also plays a role in the story. A young man in modern America is terrorized by visions of an earlier, primitive life. Across the enormous chasm of thousands of centuries, his consciousness has become entwined with that of Big-Tooth, an ancestor living at the dawn of humanity. Big-Tooth makes his home in Pleistocene Africa, a ferocious, fascinating younger world torn by incessant conflict between early humans and protohumans. Before Adam is a remarkable and provocative tale that thrust evolution further into the public spotlight in the early twentieth century and has since become a milestone of speculative fiction. The brilliance of the book lies not only in its telling but also in its imaginative projection of a mindset for early humans. Capitalizing on his recognized ability to understand animals, Jack London paints an arresting and dark portrait of how our distant ancestors thought about themselves and their world. This commemorative edition features a map of the world of Big-Tooth, an epilogue by Loren Eiseley, striking illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull, contemporary reviews, and a listing of peoples and characters. Jack London (1876-1916) is the author of such classics as Fantastic Tales (also available in a Bison Frontiers of Imagination edition), Call of the Wild, and White Fang. Dennis L. McKiernan is an acclaimed fantasy author whose popular novels of Mithgar include the Hls Crucible duology and Silver Wolf, Black Falcon. Jack London (1876-1916), was an American author and a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction. He was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing. London was self-educated. He taught himself in the public library, mainly just by reading books. In 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel, Martin Eden (1909). Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public, and a strong market for short fiction. In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, the equivalent of about $75,000 today. His career was well under way. Among his famous works are: Children of the Frost (1902), The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), White Fang (1906), The Road (1907), Before Adam (1907), Adventure (1911), and The Scarlet Plague (1912).

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