JACK

LONDON
 Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER 1. Early life and education
CHAPTER 2. Career
CHAPTER 3. London’s Literary Legacy

Conclusion
Bibliography
 ARGUMENT

I have chosen to write about Jack London because he was one of the first American writers who
fascinated my childhood with his work “White Fang”. He, Jack London, wrote of adventures and
wrote so powerfully, that you could sense the spirit of adventure arising inside you and the way
he used to write, the reader could easily make out that he had experienced whatever he wrote
about. His works were simply as authentic as they come, raw, wild and yet beautiful, from
experienced stark and brutal reality. I still remember myself reading avidly “White Fang” stashed
under my duvet, holding the book in my hands as a dog held its bone.
Jack London left behind an impressive work and an iconic style that still influences writers
today. His personality and constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative
talent.
 Introduction

Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, American novelist and short-story writer
whose best-known works—among them The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906)—
depict elemental struggles for survival. During the 20th century he was one of the most
extensively translated of American authors. He was also a journalist and an outspoken socialist
and he was the best-selling, highest paid and most popular American author of his time. He was
considered an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike
Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love
of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay", and
"The Heathen".

London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate
advocate of unionization, workers' rights, socialism, and eugenics. He wrote several works
dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The
People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.
 1. EARLY LIFE & EDUCATION

Jack London was born on January 12th, 1876 near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco.
His mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder
Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Biographer Clarice Stasz and others
believe London's father was astrologer William Chaney according to the discoveries made in his
memoirs. According to Flora Wellman's account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of
June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion and when she refused, he disclaimed
responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself but she was not seriously wounded.
After giving birth, Flora sent the baby for wet-nursing to Virginia (Jennie) Prentiss, a formerly
enslaved African-American woman and a neighbor. Prentiss was an important maternal figure
throughout London's life, and he would later refer to her as his primary source of love and
affection as a child. Chaney deserted his son and wife and late in 1876, Flora Wellman married
John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby Jack, to live with the
newly married couple. He was raised in Oakland, California, by his spiritualist mother and his
stepfather, whose surname, London, he took. Here he completed public grade school and the
Prentiss family moved with the Londons, and remained a stable source of care for the young
Jack. The family was a working class and London was largely self-educated as he used to spend
hours at the Oakland Public Library.
A 9-year-old Jack London with his dog Rollo, 1885

In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. At age 14 he quit
school to escape poverty and gain adventure. Seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his
foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named
French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. He explored San Francisco Bay in his sloop,
alternately stealing oysters or working for the government fish patrol. He went to Japan as a
sailor and saw much of the United States as a hobo riding freight trains and as a member of
Charles T. Kelly’s industrial army (one of the many protest armies of the unemployed,
like Coxey’s Army, that was born of the financial panic of 1893). After many experiences as a
hobo and a sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School. He contributed a
number of articles to the high school's magazine, The Aegis. His first published work was
"Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", an account of his sailing experiences. London saw depression
conditions, was jailed for vagrancy for 30 days, and in 1894 became a militant socialist.
London educated himself at public libraries with the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx,
and Friedrich Nietzsche, usually in popularized forms. At 19 he crammed a four-year high
school course into one year. London desperately wanted to attend the University of California,
located in Berkeley and in 1896, after a summer of intense studying to pass certification exams,
he was admitted at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1897, when he was 21 and still a
student, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt
and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago.
Chaney responded that he could not be London's father because he was impotent; he casually
asserted that London's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered
him when she said he insisted on an abortion. Chaney concluded by saying that he was more to
be pitied than London. London was devastated by his father's letter and in the months following
forced also by the financial circumstances, he quit school at Berkeley and went to
the Klondike during the gold rush boom to seek a fortune. Returning the next year, still poor and
unable to find work, he decided to earn a living as a writer. This adventure was, however, the
setting for some of his first successful stories. London studied magazines and then set himself a
daily schedule of producing sonnets, ballads, jokes, anecdotes, adventure stories, or horror
stories, steadily increasing his output.
 2. CAREER

When he was around fourteen years old he got employed at a cannery and soon after, bought a
sloop named ‘Razzle Dazzle’, thus beginning his adventurous voyages.
In 1892, he joined the ‘California Fish Patrol’ department of the ‘California Natural Resources
Agency’ and the following year; he was sent to the coast of Japan on a seal hunting schooner
called ‘Sophie Sutherland’. His story ‘Typhoon of the Coast of Japan’ is based on this journey.
In 1893, the United States was hit by a severe economic depression. The following year, he
became a member of the ‘Kelly Army’ (Coxey Army) and joined the march of the unemployed
people led by the Jacob Coxey. He led a life of a vagabond and was even imprisoned for this for
a short span, and sent to Erie County, New York.
He had amassed a lot of experience during his life as a vagabond and all these experiences
formed the basis of his book ‘The Road’.
He enrolled at the ‘Oakland High School’ and in 1896, joined the ‘University of California’,
Berkeley with a desire to pursue a literary career. However financial constraints forced the
aspiring writer to drop out of the institution a year later.
In 1896, he became a member of the ‘Socialist Labor Party’, and the following year, he set on a
journey to Canada to the Klondike (where gold was discovered which resulted in the gold rush).
Jack travelled there to mend his fortune. However, he did not get any material benefit from the
place but instead gathered a lot of experience which later helped him in his career as an author.
The gold rush expedition made him a victim of the disease Scurvy and in 1898 he went back to
his parents in Oakland, unaware of his step-father’s demise. Soon after he decided to take up a
career of an author and support his family.
During this time, he wrote the short story ‘A Thousand Deaths’ which was printed in the
magazine called ‘The Black Cat’ in the year 1899. The same year, he declined a job at the post
office and concentrated on writing. This was one of his most prolific years as he wrote stories,
poems, jokes and many more.
In1899, he sold his story ‘To the Man on the Trail’ to ‘The Overland Monthly’ magazine for
which he was paid and thus, he started earning a living as an author.
In 1900, he wrote the story ‘An Odyssey of the North’ which was published in the magazine
‘Atlantic Monthly’. The same year, his first book ‘The Son of the Wolf’, which was a collection
of stories was also released.
Ever since the publication of his first book, he has penned numerous short stories such as ‘The
Man and the Gash’, ‘Thanksgiving On Slav Creek’, ‘Housekeeping In The Klondike’, ‘The Law
of Life’, ‘Moon-Face’, ‘To Build a Fire’, collection of short stories such as ‘Children of the
Frost’, ‘Lost Face’, ‘South Sea Tales’, and even written plays, poetry, essays, novels and
autobiographical pieces.
In 1902, he travelled to England and penned the book ‘The People of the Abyss’ and began work
on another story named ‘The Call of the Wild’ which was published the following year.
He worked as a journalist during the ‘Russo-Japanese War’ for the newspaper ‘The San
Francisco Examiner’ in 1904.
He reported about the San Francisco earthquake as a correspondent of the magazine named
‘Collier’s’ in the year 1906.
From 1907, he authored many other literary pieces and travelled to different places and bought
properties. His voyages also probably provide materials for his stories.
His novels include ‘The Cruise of the Dazzler’, ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘The Sea-Wolf’, ‘White
Fang’ and many more.
The autobiographical pieces penned by this author are ‘The Road’, ‘The Cruise of the Snark’ and
‘John Barleycorn’.

3. London’s Literary Legacy

London’s first book, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900), is a collection of short
stories that he had previously published in magazines, gained a wide audience. London wrote
and published steadily, completing some 50 books of fiction and nonfiction in 17 years.
Although he became the highest-paid writer in the United States at that time, his earnings never
matched his expenditures, and he was never freed of the urgency of writing for money. He sailed
a ketch to the South Pacific, telling of his adventures in The Cruise of the Snark (1911). In 1910
he settled on a ranch near Glen Ellen, California, where he built his grandiose Wolf House. He
maintained his socialist beliefs almost to the end of his life.
Jack London’s output, typically hastily written, is of uneven literary quality, though his highly
romanticized stories of adventure can be compulsively readable. His Alaskan novels The Call of
the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and Burning Daylight (1910), in which he dramatized in
turn atavism, adaptability, and the appeal of the wilderness, are outstanding. His short story “To
Build a Fire” (1908), set in the Klondike, is a masterly depiction of humankind’s inability to
overcome nature; it was reprinted in 1910 in the short-story collection Lost Face, one of many
such volumes that London published. In addition to Martin Eden, he wrote two other
autobiographical novels of considerable interest: The Road (1907) and John Barleycorn (1913).
Other important novels are The Sea-Wolf (1904), which features a Nietzschean superman hero,
Humphrey Van Weyden, who battles the vicious Wolf Larsen; and The Iron Heel (1908), a
fantasy of the future that is a terrifying anticipation of fascism.

London writing The Sea-Wolf in 1903

London’s reputation declined in the United States in the 1920s, when a new generation of
writers made the pre-World War I writers seem lacking in sophistication. But his popularity
remained high throughout the world after World War II, especially in Russia, where a
commemorative edition of his works published in 1956 was reported to have been sold out in
five hours. A three-volume set of his letters, edited by Earle Labor et al., was published in 1988.
A complete list of Jack London books, by date of publication, follows:

 1900 The Son of the Wolf

 1901 The God of His Fathers
 1902 Children of the Frost
 1902 The Cruise of the Dazzler
 1902 A Daughter of the Snows
 1903 The Kempton-Wace Letters
 1903 The Call of the Wild
 1903 The People of the Abyss
 1904 The Faith of Men
 1904 The Sea Wolf
 1905 War of the Classes
 1905 The Game
 1905 Tales of the Fish Patrol
 1906 Moon-Face and Other Stories
 1906 White Fang
 1906 The Scorn of Women
 1907 Before Adam
 1907 Love of Life and Other Stories
 1907 The Road
 1908 The Iron Heel
 1909 Martin Eden
 1910 Lost Face
 1910 Theft
 1910 Revolution and Other Essays
 1910 Burning Daylight
 1911 When God Laughs and Other Stories
 1911 Adventure
 1911 The Cruise of the Snark
 1911 South Sea Tales
  1912 The House of Pride and Other Stories
 1912 A Son of the Sun
 1912 Smoke Bellew
 1913 The Night-Born
 1913 The Abysmal Brute
 1913 John Barleycorn
 1913 The Valley of the Moon
 1914 The Strength of the Strong
 1914 The Mutiny of the Elsinore
 1915 The Scarlet Plague
 1915 The Star Rover
 1916 The Little Lady of the Big House
 1916 The Acorn Planter
 1916 The Turtles of Tasman
 1917 The Human Drift
 1917 Jerry of the Islands
 1917 Michael Brother of Jerry
 1918 The Red One
 1918 Hearts of Three
 1919 On the Makaloa Mat
 1922 Dutch Courage and Other Stories
 1963 The Assassination Bureau

Nevertheless, Jack London did not become a writer because it was his great passion, but simply
because he wanted to do something creative in his work, and writing provided such an outlet
along with the financial independence he sought. It was a means to an end, and while he wasn’t a
slave to those means, he struggled with managing the ends:
 CONCLUSIONS

:
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. https://jacklondonpark.com/jack-london-biography/
2. https://jacklondonpark.com/jack-london-books/
3. https://users.aber.ac.uk/jpm/ellsa/ellsa_londonbio.html
4. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/short-heroic-rags-riches-life-
jack-london-180961200/
5. https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-life-of-jack-london-as-a-case-study-in-the-
power-and-perils-of-thumos-10-ashes/