Best 1906 Adventures (8)

By: Joshua Glenn
October 29, 2016

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1906 adventure novels. Happy 110th anniversary!

*

everybodys-1906-10

Jack London’s atavistic adventure Before Adam.

Big Tooth, a hominid Australopithecine ancestor of ours, grows up in a primitive community of cave-dwellers, surrounded by other hominid tribes — some, who dwell in trees, are even more primitive; others, known as the Fire People, more advanced. He and his friend, Lop Ear, accidentally discover boating by falling into a river and catching onto a log; tools; even music and language. Desire for food and sex drive Big Tooth’s every action. He battles his fellow hominids and a saver-toothed tiger; and searches for a mate. Big Tooth has no thought for the future; his life is nasty, brutish, and short. (Ringo Starr’s movie Caveman is a slapstick version of this kind of thing; Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children books, which began to appear at exactly the same time as Caveman, are a middlebrow version.) Bizarrely, Before Adam is narrated — neutrally, without value judgments; in fact, the book can be read as a kind of illustration of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Darwinian proto-sociobiology — by a young boy capable of tapping into his “racial memories.”

Fun fact: Serialized in 1906 and 1907 in Everybody’s Magazine. London’s The Scarlet Plague, a 1912 post-apocalyptic novel, imagines humankind returning to this primitive way of life… amid the ruins of early 20th century civilization!

***

Let me know if I’ve missed any 1906 adventures that you particularly admire.

Categories

Adventure, Lit Lists