Jack London (1876 - 1916) was an American novelist, journalist and social activist. Pioneering the genre of magazine fiction and prototyping science fi ction, he became one of the fi rst writers, who gained worldwide fame and a large fortune. The story of the novel “Before Adam” is told through the eyes of a man of the early twentieth century who suffers from a split personality syndrome: every night he sees bright dreams, in which he is a distant ancestor of a man who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. After seeing these dreams, the main character tries to reconstruct the life of his alter ego.