THE OVERMAN BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Industrial Republic The Jungle King Midas Manassas Prince Hagen The Journal of Arthur Stirling [Illustration: “‘I HAD STEPPED OUT UPON THE SUMMIT, AND STOOD TRANSFIXED WITH THE GLORY OF AN ENDLESS VISION OF DAWN’”] The Overman By UPTON SINCLAIR _WITH FRONTISPIECE_ [Illustration] New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1907 COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY UPTON SINCLAIR COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED, SEPTEMBER, 1907 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN THE OVERMAN _The Overman_ This is the story of Edward ——, as he told it to me only a few days before he died; he told it as he lay half paralysed, and knowing that the hand of death was upon him. I am by profession a scientist. My story goes back some fifty years, when I was a student. I had one brother, Daniel, five years younger than myself, a musician of extraordinary promise. We lived abroad together for a number of years, each pursuing his own work. About my brother, suffice it to say that music to him was everything—love and friendship, ambition and life. He was a man without a stain, whose lower nature had been burned out by the flame of art. I think the one tie that bound him to the world was myself. When Daniel was about twenty-three years of age, his health weakened, and a long sea voyage was decided upon. I could not go with him, so for the first time we parted; and it was twenty years after that before I ever heard of him again. It was believed that the ship had been wrecked in the South Seas; and I had given him up for dead many years, when it chanced that, as a man advanced in life, I was travelling as a naturalist in Ceylon, and met an old sailor who had been with my brother, and who told me a strange story—how one boat containing five men, including Daniel, had outlived the storm and landed upon an uninhabited island; how, after remaining there for several months, they had made up their minds to risk a voyage in their frail craft; and how my brother alone had refused, declaring his intention to remain by himself, with his violin and the few effects that he had saved. How this affected me anyone can imagine. The tale was obviously a true one, and I chanced to have means; and so, getting the best idea I could of the island’s location, I purchased a yacht outright and prepared to make a search.