![]() Set 25,000 years ago, it begins the story of Ayla, an orphaned Cro Magnon child adopted by a Neanderthal clan. Rowling.Ĭlan of the Cave Bear was conceived as the first of the six books of the Earth’s Children series. ![]() The success of Clan of the Cave Bear was not exceeded until 1997, with the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ( Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States) by J.K. The book was made into a feature film in 1986. Most books on best-seller lists appear for a few weeks at most, but Clan of the Cave Bear held its place for eight months, selling millions of copies worldwide and putting Auel in the company of Stephen King and Anne Rice, two of the most popular writers of the 1980s. And she did it with one book, Clan of the Cave Bear (1980). He said, 'Oh you are, are you?' I said, 'Yes, we are'.No contemporary Oregon writer has achieved the superstar celebrity status of Jean Auel. "I told my husband we were spending a night on the mountain learning how to build snow caves. (Auel can recommend a recipe from Aborigine and Inuit culture: meat pounded into crumbly pieces, then formed into patties with clear fat and berries.) She took classes in survival techniques, camping out on Oregon's Mount Hood at the height of winter. Discovering what cavemen had for lunch required that she follow in the footsteps of modern hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless, in order to put convincing flesh on her characters' bones, Auel could not bury her nose in a book. An amateur anthropologist she may be, but Auel has become a respected expert in her field. She estimates that her library holds 2,000 to 3,000 volumes, and about the same number of articles and periodicals, sent mainly by admiring academics. It was the research that stimulated the imagination."Īuel's learning is prodigious. (She worked alongside her fellow novelist, Ursula K Le Guin.) Given this hectic schedule, it is perhaps unsurprising that Auel struggles to explain exactly where Ayla came from. A member of Mensa, Auel also earned an MBA and pursued a successful career in a technology firm. Married at 18, she had five children by the age of 25. The idea for the Earth's Children series struck in 1977, when Auel was 40 years old. If I could have used that directly, I would have," Auel adds rather wistfully. "That was the tribe's way of dealing with a selfish man. Because polar bears are so carnivorous, their livers are rich enough in vitamin A to be poisonous. A question about Cro-Magnon crime and punishment inspires a ghoulish tale of an Eskimo found guilty of selfishness: the miscreant stole strips of meat from his tribe's store of liver the tribe's solution was to swap their usual liver with cuts from a polar bear. ![]() It isn't always clear, however, where the anthropologist ends and the novelist begins. Auel's conversation combines an academic's pedantic passion for the arcane corners of her specialist subject with a storyteller's desire to communicate them as dramatically as possible. She might look like a hippy ideal of grandmotherhood, but her years spent investigating primitive humankind ensure that our conversation heads down several esoteric avenues: markings on horses' teeth, prehistoric attitudes towards disability, and arguing competitions in the Arctic. It's safe to say that Jean Auel is not your average author.
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