BEFORE ADAM

1907. With Numerous Illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907. 4 pp undated ads. Original light brown cloth decorated in brown and lettered in red and white.

First Edition of this odd novel written several years earlier, not long after THE CALL OF THE WILD, during London's three-year "long sickness." Just as much of that novel consists of Buck's bad dreams, so in BEFORE ADAM the nameless narrator describes his strange dreams which, he asserts, are memories of a prehistoric ancestor named Big Tooth. Like Jack, the dreamer in BEFORE ADAM suffered a procession of night­mares, full of forests and horrors without end, great serpents and prowling monsters; he had lost his true primeval father, and his alien stepfather pushed him out of the treehouse where he lived with his suspicious and unprogressive mother into the tooth-and-claw world of prehistory. As an atavistic projection of Jack's distorted vision of his deprived childhood, the opening of BEFORE ADAM can serve as a document in Jungian analysis. [Sinclair] This is a near-fine copy (very slight rubbing at the extremities, partial darkening of the endpapers); the front free endpaper bears a calligraphic "My Sweetheart Boy". Sisson & Martens p. 34; Blanck 11903; a Johnson High Spot ("The life of prehistoric man so fascinates me that I am compelled to include this book").