Jack London (1876 - 1916) was an American novelist, journalist and social activist. Pioneering the genre of magazine fiction and prototyping science fiction, he became one of the first 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.