Jack London (1876 - 1916) was an American novelist, journalist and social activist whose fiction of the Yukon and the Pacific brought him international fame. [1] The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea-Wolf combine vivid narrative with Darwinian and socialist ideas, and he was among the first American writers to become wealthy from commercial fiction. He was also a pioneering war correspondent and the author of the social documentary The People of the Abyss. [2]
Early life
London was born John Griffith Chaney on 12 January 1876 in San Francisco and was raised in Oakland by his mother and his stepfather, John London, from whom he took his surname. [1] The family was poor, and he worked from boyhood, delivering papers, setting pins in a bowling alley and labouring in a cannery.
In his teens he raided the oyster beds of San Francisco Bay from his own sloop, then worked for the fish patrol, and at seventeen shipped aboard the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland for a voyage to Japan and the Bering Sea. Returning during the depression of the 1890s, he travelled the country as a tramp and was jailed for thirty days for vagrancy at Niagara Falls, an experience that pushed him toward socialism and self-education. [2] He completed high school in Oakland and spent a single semester at the University of California, Berkeley, before lack of money ended his studies.
The Klondike
In 1897 London joined the rush to the Klondike goldfields in the Yukon. He found no gold and developed scurvy, returning home within a year, but the northern winter gave him the material for the work that made his name. [3]
His first collection, The Son of the Wolf, appeared in 1900. The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, follows a domestic dog stolen and sold into sled work in the Yukon who reverts to a wild state; it was an immediate success and remains his most widely read book. White Fang (1906) reverses the pattern, tracing a wild animal's move toward domestication. The short story "To Build a Fire" is among the most anthologised in American literature.
Other writing and journalism
London wrote prolifically, producing more than fifty books in under two decades. The Sea-Wolf (1904) draws on his voyage to Japan for the ruthless captain Wolf Larsen. The Iron Heel (1908) imagines the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States, an early work of dystopian fiction, and Martin Eden (1909) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a working-class writer's disillusionment. John Barleycorn (1913) is a frank memoir of his drinking. [1]
He worked as a reporter as well, covering the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and the Mexican Revolution in 1914. In 1902 he spent weeks living among the poor of London's East End and published the result as The People of the Abyss. [2] An active socialist, he lectured widely and twice stood unsuccessfully for mayor of Oakland.
Later life
With his earnings London bought land at Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, California, which he developed as Beauty Ranch using experimental agricultural methods. In 1907 he began a voyage around the world aboard a self-designed ketch, the Snark, abandoning it in Australia because of illness, and his house, Wolf House, burned down shortly before completion in 1913. [4]
His health declined under the effects of hard living, alcohol and kidney disease, and he died at the ranch on 22 November 1916 at the age of forty. The precise cause has been disputed by biographers.
Legacy
London's best books have never been out of print and have been adapted for film many times, and his land at Glen Ellen is preserved as Jack London State Historic Park. [4] He is remembered as a writer of powerful adventure narrative and as a chronicler of poverty and class conflict. [3]
