American novelist who gained international fame with her Earth's Children series, sagas about life in the Stone Age Europe and the early tribesmen. Begun in 1980 with The Clan of the Cave Bear, the six-volume series was concluded in 2011. Jean M. Auel's novels are detailed and based on research but they are also colored with a captivating storyline and vivid imagination. By 2010, her prehistoric romances had sold more than 45 million copies in 28 languages.

"Clan Gatherings were also a time to reestablish old acquaintances, see relatives from other clans, and exchange gossip and stories that would enliven many a cold winter evening for the next few years. Young people, unable to find mates within their own clan, vied for each other's attention, though matings could only take place if the woman was acceptable to the leader of the young man's clan. It was considered an honor for a young woman to be chosen, especially by a clan of a higher status, although moving away would be traumatic for her and her loved ones left behind." (The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel, New York: Bantam Books, 2011, p. 346; originally published in the United States by Crown Publishers, 1980)

Jean Marie Auel was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Neil S. Untinen, a housepainter, and Martha (Wirtanen) Untinen. Jean Marie was the second of five children. Upon graduating from Jones Commercial High School in Chicago, she married Ray Bernard Auel in 1954; they had five children within six years. As a counterbalance to her daily household affairs, she became in 1964 an active member of Mensa. In 1965-66 she was employed as a clerk in Beaverton, Oregon, then as a circuit board designer (1966-1973), technical writer (1973-74), and eventually a credit manager (1974-1976).

After studies at Portland State University, Oregon and University of Portland, Auel received her M.B.A. in 1976, at the age of forty. In the same year she got the idea for a story about a girl, Ayla, living amongst people who are different from her. (Her name may be derived from a corrupted form of the Finnish first name Aila.) Auel left her well-paying position in a Portland electronics plant and devoted herself entirely to writing.

The idea started to grow and after intense research she finished in six months a 450,000 word manuscript. However, dissatisfied with her work, she then borrowed from a library writing guides and wrote several more drafts. During the long creative process, Auel learned ancient hunting methods, tanning methods, how to knapp flint and prepare food from caribou brain. 

At first she had difficulties to find a publisher for her novel, especially because she planned to continued the story in five subsequent instalments. The first edition of the book was published by Crown - publishers had eventually realized that Auel's prehistoric romance was a potential literary sensation and in spite of being a totally unknown author, Auel received a record advance of $130,000 after an auction was held for the contract.

On Auel's first research trip to Europe the archaeologist Jean-Philippe Rigaud helped to arrange a visit to Lascaux Cave, famous for its prehistoric paintings. Her second visit to the cave of Niaux lasted about six hours. Auel was guided by Dr. Jean Clottes. 

The 1980s and the 1990s were the golden age of paleofiction. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), the first in the Earth's Children Series, became one of the major works in the evolution of the genre, which settled as a part of the feminist literary movement. An immediate success, Auel's work sold over three million paper-back copies and earned her an American Book Award Nominatiom. The story of self-discovery, "The Ugly Duckling" set in the ancient times, was translated into several languages, among others into Finnish - Auel's grandparents, families Untinen and Virtanen, originated from Finland, Ostrobothnian region, known for its independent and enterprising people.

Auel starts her series with a story of survival. The story is set in what is now the Crimean peninsula. An orphaned Cro-Magnon child, Ayla, is adopted by the Neanderthal Clan of the Cave Bear. She grows up in the Neanderthal community, which is ruled by traditions and taboos. Auel pays much attention to Ayla's resourcefulness, which is a constant source of astonishment.  "She was one of the Others; a newer, younger breed, more vital, more dynamic . . . Her brain followed different paths, her full, high forehead that housed forward-thinking frontal lobes gave her an understanding from a different view." (Ibid., p. 147) Ayla is considered a misfit: females must submit to males. Her clan avoids the Others, her rebelling against male dominance is punished, and finally she is forced to leave her hybrid son Durc and to seek her own destiny. "Before dipping in and disturbing the mirrored surface, she leaned over and looked at herself. She studied her features carefully; she didn't seem so ugly this time, but it wasn't herself she was interested in. She wanted to see the face of the Others." (Ibid., p. 449) 

Nicholas Ruddick has argued in Fire in the Stone (2009) that one of Auel's "most important speculative extrapolations from the fossil evidence was that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons did not think alike: that was why their skulls (and brains) differed in shape." (The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel by Nicholas Ruddick, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2009, p. 85)

As a blond, blue-eyed woman, Ayla is more than a typical "Aryan" heroine - she is a combination of Tarzan's Jane, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, and Amelia Earhart in the same person. Her intelligence separates her from the other tribe members, although physically she is submitted to the leader of the Neanderthals. In 1988, parents of students attending Berrien Springs High School in Michigan challenged the use of the novel in classroom. Five years later the novel was challenged at Moorpark High School in Sunneyville, California. Parents complained that the novel contained "hardcore graphic sexual content." (Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds by Dawn B. Sova, New York: Facts On File, 2006, pp. 48-49)

In The Valley of Horses (1983) Ayla searches for the Others, learns the secrets of fire, and is helped by animals. The story introduces Ayla's mate Jondalar, a Cro-Magnon man, also tall and yellow-haired, and his brother Thonolan, who gets killed by a cave lion. "The novel's main interest is in the well-told details of prehistoric life. The brothers' journey introduces a succession of Stone Age cultures—all female-centered, worshipping a divine "Mother" in various guises". ('Auel, Jean Marie, née Untinen) by Linda S. Bergmann, in Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, edited by Lesley Henderson, with  preface by Kay Mussell, Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1990, p. 19) The Mammoth Hunters (1985), which sold 1,100,000 copies, presents a triangle drama between Ayla, the dark-skinned Ranec, and jealous Jondalar. Ayla also finds her first women friends among the tribe of Mamutoi and learns the customs and language of the Others, who live in what is now Ukraine.

The Plains of Passage (1990) tells of Ayla's journey along with Jondalar through the grasslands of Ice Age Europe to reach a place they can call home; the Great Mother River described in the story is the Danube. Jondalar is captured by man-hating women and rescued by Ayla. In the end of the story Ayla is happily pregnant. Before the story of Ayla continued, readers had to wait 12 years.

In the fifth book, The Shelters of Stone (2002), Ayla struggles for her place in Jondalar's tribe, the Zelendonii. "She was a stranger, a disturbing stranger who brought animals and who knew what other threatening foreign ways and outrageous ideas. Would they accept her? What if they didn't? She couldn't go back, her people lived more than a year's travel to the east. Jolandar had promised that he would leave with her if she wanted—or was forced—to go, but that was before he saw everyone, before he was greeted so warmly. How would he feel now?" (The Shelters of Stone, New York: Bantam Dell, 2003, p. 4) The Ninth Cave of the Zelendonii is the rock-shelter of Laugerie-Haute, in the Dordogne, south-central France.

Ayla and Jondalar prepare for the formal mating at the Summer Meeting, she faces Jondalar's former lover, Marona, and proves her skills as a healer. The fifth installment was a disappointment for Katherine A. Powers: "It strikes one as being a romance for people who fantasize about going into business -- something with a strong emphasis on crafts and home products and professional conferences. In other words, the spirit of Martha Stewart informs the pages as much as the Great Mother's does." ('Hear Me Roar' by Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post, May 25, 2002) The 6th and final volume in the Earth's Children series was entitled Land of Painted Caves (2011). Auel also planned to write a prehistoric murder mystery.

Auel uses the prehistoric setting to explore gender roles, drawing parallels between cave society and contemporary social structures. Bernard Gallagher has criticized Auel for presenting relations between the sexes as "a matter of either/or. Either men are dominant or women are dominant." (quoted in 'The Not-So-Failed Feminism of Jean Auel' by Clyde Wilcox, Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 28, Issue 3, Winter 1994, p. 63) Ayla is a feminist heroine from the theories of matriarchal prehistory, she hunts with the men, but she is not a warlike Amazon, a Wonder Woman, or an Upper Paleolithic Princess Leia. She is a conciliator and innovator, the first to ride on a horse and tame a wolf as a domestic animal, she knows the secrets of the herbs, and she invents a new technique for making fire by striking iron pyrite onto flint.

Although Auel's Stone Age fantasy in many respects contradict archaeologists vision of the past, she has managed to create a fictional world, that corresponds to reality more than Edgar Rice Burroughs's adventure stories. However, Auel's attempt to impose the changing social roles of modern women on prehistory has been criticized by Joseph Carroll as "a narcissistic fantasy that makes a false and sensationalistic use of sociopolitical themes and symbolic images. . . . Auel's heroine is merely an evocation of Auel's own sense of personal identity transplanted into a world in which it does not belong—like a Pomeranian dog or a Persian cat transplanted into a savage wilderness." ('Adaptationist Criteria of Literary Value: Assessing Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger, Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, and Golding's The Inheritors,' in Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature by Joseph Carroll, New York; London: Routledge, 2004, p. 176)

The film adaptation of The Clan of the Cave Bear (1985), produced on Canadian exteriors, combined sex, stone-age, and anthropology. It was not so realistic as Quest for Fire (1981), dealing with the problems of primitive men, or humorous as the legendary animated series Flintstones, but far more intelligent than One Million Years BC (1966), starring Raquel Welsh in her famous fur trimmed bikini. The long-limbed, healthy-looking Daryl Hannah as Ayla is a sympathetic pre-historic feminist - before this role, she just had played a replicant, and mermaid, and left these these kind characters for a while.

During her career, Auel has received several awards, including an American Book Award nomination for best first novel and Friends of Literature Award for The Clan of the Cave Bear (1981), Scandinavian Kaleidoscope of Art and Life Award (1982), Golden Plate award (1986), American Academy of Achievement (1986), Silver Trowel Award (1990), National Zoo Award (1990), Waldo award from Waldenbrooks, and Persie Aeard for WIN (both 1990). She has honorary degrees from University of Portland, University of Maine, and Mt. Vernon College. 

For further reading: The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel by Nicholas Ruddick (2009); Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds by Dawn B. Sova (2006); 'Adaptationist Criteria of Literary Value: Assessing Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger, Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, and Golding's The Inheritors', in Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature by Joseph Carroll (2004); 'Hear Me Roar' by Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post (May 26, 2002); A to Z of American Women Writers by Carol Kort (2000); 'Wells, Golding, and Auel: Representing the Neanderthal' by Charles DePaolo, in Science Fiction Studies, Volume 27 (2000); 'The Not-So-Failed Feminism of Jean Auel' by Clyde Wilcox, Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 28, Issue 3 (Winter 1994); 'Auel, Jean Marie, née Untinen) by Linda S. Bergmann, in Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, edited by Lesley Henderson (1990) - See also: William Golding's The Inheritors (1955), Björn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger (1978)

Selected works:

• The Clan of the Cave Bear: a Novel, 1980
  - Luolakarhun klaani (suom. Erkki Hakala, 1981)
  - Film 1985, directed by Michael Chapman, screenplay by John Sayles, photographer Jan de Bont, starring Daryl Hannah, Pamela Reed, James Remar, Thomas G. Waites, John Doolittle
• The Valley of Horses, 1983
  - Hevosten laakso (suom. Erkki Hakala, 1982)
• The Mammoth Hunters, 1985
  - Mammutin metsästäjät (suom. Erkki Hakala, 1985)
• The Plains of Passage, 1990
  - Tasangon vaeltajat (suom. Tiina Ohinmaa, Aulis Rantanen, Kirsti Kattelus, 1990)
• The Shelters of Stone, 2002
  - Luolien suojatit (suom. Ulla Selkälä, Ilkka Äärelä, 2002)
• The Land of Painted Caves, 2011
  - Maalattujen luolien maa (suom. 2011)