forerunner

You might think of this novel as a rebuttal or counterpoint to its forerunner, a book that replaces roseate campus fantasy with spikier societal conflicts.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 2026

Webb eschews the Wagnerian method of film scoring—dark motifs for the evil characters, bright tunes for the good ones—in favor of fluid, shifting psychological music, a forerunner of Hitchcock’s scores with Bernard Herrmann.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 4, 2026

Burnham has long been involved with fans' groups and he founded Supporters Direct, one of the forerunner organisations to the Football Supporters' Association.

From BBC ● Jul. 21, 2026

She made the leap to the small screen in the 1950s on Children's Television Club, a forerunner of Blue Peter.

From BBC ● May 22, 2026

More nuanced and more revealing is Wills’s other remark—that “Everett’s classicism was as much the forerunner of Lincoln’s talk as its foil or contrast.”

From "Words Like Loaded Pistols" by Sam Leith

Margaret and Alice are the forerunners of Lucy and Ethel, and Shakespeare’s comedy, written expressly to entertain, gives us a sense of what an Elizabethan-era situation comedy might look like.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2026

His 18th-century forerunners, the London macaroni and the Paris incroyable, had one foot in the court and the other in the city street, but the dandy, posh or not, lived in a middle-class, democratic society.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 15, 2026

Having Albert Brooks as a best friend likely molded his style too; both were forerunners of a school of comedy that merged a naturalistic, conversational delivery with an absurdist sensibility.

From Salon ● Dec. 21, 2025

The flames would then be spread across the country for about 1,200 forerunners to relay.

From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2024

The two states, Wari and Tiwanaku, were probably the greatest of the Inkas’ forerunners, and certainly the predecessors from whom they took the most.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann