Jack London

Life

Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876 and grew up in Oakland in a family that was often poor. He left school at fourteen and worked in a cannery, as an oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay, on a sealing schooner in the North Pacific, and in a jute mill, and he spent a period as a tramp riding freight trains across the country. He read constantly and briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley before leaving for lack of money.

In 1897 he joined the Klondike Gold Rush, spent a hard winter in the Yukon, and came home with scurvy and no gold. The experience gave him his material. He sold his first stories of the north to magazines in 1899, and The Call of the Wild (1903) made him one of the most popular writers in the United States. He followed it with The Sea-Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906), The Iron Heel (1908), and Martin Eden (1909), among many other books, and was for a time one of the highest-paid authors in the country.

London was a committed socialist who lectured and ran for office on the party ticket. He married twice and built a large ranch at Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, California, where he experimented with scientific farming and where a house he was building burned down before he could move in. He died at the ranch in 1916, at forty, after years of heavy drinking and kidney disease.

Literary significance

London was among the first American writers to make a large income from fiction alone, and his short, hard stories of survival in the north helped establish the plain, physical style associated with American writing in the twentieth century. His work combines a belief in individual will with a conviction, drawn from Darwin and Spencer, that nature is indifferent and that only the strong and adaptable survive. He was also a serious writer on labor, poverty, and class, and his reporting on London’s East End, The People of the Abyss (1903), is still read. He remains one of the most translated American authors.

Where to start

The Call of the Wild is short, complete, and the book that made his reputation. White Fang, which tells a similar story in reverse, is the usual second step.