Before Adam

A modern man has dreamed since childhood of another life, and he comes to understand that he is remembering, through 'racial memory', the life of his remote ancestor, Big-Tooth, a creature of the Stone Age half way between ape and man. In his dreams he lives among the Cave People in the forest, with his friend Lop-Ear and the girl Swift One, fleeing from the terrible Red-Eye and from the more advanced Fire People, who have bows and arrows.

Jack London published the novel in 1907, inspired by the new science of evolution, and it influenced later stories of prehistoric life. Read London's The Call of the Wild and Wells's The Time Machine.

Jack London (1876–1916) grew up poor in San Francisco and Oakland and lived a life as wild as his books: an oyster pirate at fifteen, a sailor on a sealing ship to Japan, a tramp, a socialist agitator and a gold seeker in the Klondike in 1897, where he caught scurvy and gathered material for a lifetime.

The Call of the Wild made him famous in 1903, and he became one of the best-paid writers of his day, producing White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden among more than fifty books. He died on his California ranch at forty.