Best 1906 Adventures (8)
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October 29, 2016
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1906 adventure novels. Happy 110th anniversary!
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.