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OverviewBefore Adam is a novel by Jack London, serialized in 1906 and 1907 in Everybody's Magazine. It is the story of a man who dreams he lives the life of an early hominid.The story offers an early view of human evolution. The majority of the story is told through the eyes of the man'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-Eye, a fierce atavism that perpetually terrorizes the Cave People. A sabre-cat also plays a role in the story.John Griffith Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.Some of 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 of the South Pacific in such stories as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen , and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.London was part of the radical literary group, The Crowd , in San Francisco, and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction expose The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[7] Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist, claiming to channel the spirit of a Sauk chief Black Hawk.Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe London's father was astrologer William Chaney. Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown. Most San Francisco civil records were destroyed by the extensive fires that followed the 1906 earthquake; nobody knows what name appeared on her son's birth certificate. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to London's mother Flora Wellman as having been his wife ; he also cites an advertisement in which Flora called herself Florence Wellman Chaney. According to Flora Wellman's account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. When she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. After giving birth, Flora turned the baby over for care to Virginia Prentiss, an African-American woman and former slave. She was a major maternal figure throughout London's life. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby John, later known as Jack, to live with the newly married couple. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London completed public grade school.In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Jack LondonPublisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform Imprint: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 0.60cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.150kg ISBN: 9781500900946ISBN 10: 150090094 Pages: 104 Publication Date: 20 August 2014 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Temporarily unavailable  The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you. Table of ContentsReviewsAuthor InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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