A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Jack London (1876-1916), prolific American novelist and short story writer, whose works deal romantically with the overwhelming power of nature and the struggle for survival. London's identification with the wilderness has made him popular among the Green movement. His left-wing philosophy is seen in the class struggle novel The Iron Heel (1908). John Barleycorn (1913), which describes London's drinking bouts, connects him with such later authors as Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac. On the other hand, the author's views about the superiority of white people and Social Darwinism, have placed him among ultra-right conservatives. Jack London was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was deserted by his father, William Henry Chaney, an itinerant astrologer. He was raised in Oakland, California by his mother Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist. Because Flora was ill, Jack was raised through infancy by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss, who would remain a major maternal figure while the boy grew up. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran. London's youth was marked by poverty. He autorbusght himself in the public library, mainly just by reading books about fiction, philosophy, poetry and political science. In 1885 he found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa, which describes an unschooled Italian peasant child who achieves fame as an opera composer. He credited this as the seed of his literary aspiration. At the age of ten he became an avid reader, and borrowed books from the Oakland Public Library. Jack London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. The house of his birth burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and a plaque was placed at this site by the California Historical Society in 1953. In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out of this gruelling labor, he borrowed money from his black foster-mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. London also worked as a newspaper correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, and in 1914 a war correspondent in Mexico. In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for the coast of Japan. When he returned, the country was in the grip of the panic of '93 and Oakland was swept by labor unrest. After gruelling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly's industrial army and began his career as a tramp. In 1894 he was arrested in Niagara Falls and jailed for vagancy. After many experiences as a hobo, and as a sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School, where 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. Jack London desperately wanted to attend the University of California and in 1896 gained admittance to the university but financial circumstances forced him to leave in 1897 and so he never graduated. London joined the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. In the same year, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story about the twenty year old London giving nightly speeches in Oakland's City Hall Park; an activity he was arrested for a year later. On July 25, 1897, Jack London and his brother-in-law, James Shepard, sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he would later set his first successful stories. London's time in the Klondike, however, was quite detrimental to his health. Like so many others malnourished while involved in the Klondike Gold Rush, he developed scurvy. His gums became swollen, eventually leading to the loss of his four front teeth. A constant gnawing pain affected his abdomen and leg muscles, and his face was stricken with scars that would forever remind him of the struggles he faced in the Klondike. London survived the hardships of the Klondike, and these struggles inspired what is often called his best short story, To Build a Fire. It tells the story of a new arrival to the Klondike who stubbornly ignores warnings about the folly of travelling alone. He falls through the ice into a creek in seventy-below weather, and his survival depends on being able to build a fire and dry his clothes, which he is unable to do. The famous version of this story was published in 1908. Jack London published an earlier and radically different version in 1902, and a comparison of the two provides a dramatic illustration of the growth of his literary ability. For the remainder of 1898 London again tried to earn his living by writing. His early stories appeared in the Overland Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly. Jack London married Bess Maddern on April 7, 1900, the same day The Son of the Wolf was published. Bess had been part of his circle of friends for a number of years. Their first child, Joan, was born on January 15, 1901, and their second, Bessie (later called Becky), on October 20, 1902. Both children were born in Piedmont, California, but the marriage itself was under continuous strain and London left her and their two daughters in 1904, eventually to marry Charmian Kittredge in 1905. In 1901 London ran unsuccessfully on the Socialist party ticket for mayor of Oakland. He started to steadily produce novels, nonfiction and short stories, becoming in his lifetime one of the most popular authors. His Alaska stories, The Call Of The Wild (1903), in which a giant pet dog Buck finds his survival instincts in Yukon, White Fang (1906) and Burning Daylight (1910) gained a large reading public. Among his other works are The Sea-Wolf (1904) and The Road (1907), a collection of short stories that inspired later writers like John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac. In 1902 London went to England, where he studied the living conditions in East End and working class areas of the capital city. His report about the economic degradation of the poor, The People Of The Abyss (1903), was a surprise success in the U.S. but criticized in England. London shared common Californian concerns about Asian immigration and "the yellow peril" (which he used as the title of an essay he wrote in 1904). In 1906, he published his first collection of non-fiction pieces, The War Of The Classes, which included his lectures on socialism. The same year, he published in Collier's magazine his eye-witness report of the big earthquake. London also published a semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) and a travel book The Cruise of the Snark (1913), a memoir of Jack and Charmian London's 1907-1909 voyage across the Pacific. Jack London's autobiographical book of "alcoholic memoirs", John Barleycorn, was published in 1913. Recommended by Alcoholics Anonymous, it depicts the outward and inward life of an alcoholic. A socialist viewpoint is evident in his novel The Iron Heel (1908). No theorist or intellectual socialist, Jack London's socialism came from his life experience. A serious incident about plagiarism involved Chapter 7 of The Iron Heel, entitled "The Bishop's Vision." This chapter is almost identical with an ironic essay Frank Harris published in 1901, entitled "The Bishop of London and Public Morality." Harris was incensed and suggested he should receive 1/60th of the royalties from The Iron Heel, the disputed material constituting about that fraction of the whole novel. Jack London insisted he had clipped a reprint of the article which had appeared in an American newspaper, and believed it to be a genuine speech delivered by the genuine Bishop of London. In 1910, Jack London purchased a 1,000 acre (4 kmē) ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain, for $26,000, and devoted his energy and money improving and enlarging his Beauty Ranch. After 1910, his literary works were mostly potboilers, written out of the need to provide operating income for the ranch. The ranch was, by most measures, a colossal failure. In 1913 London's Beauty Ranch burned to the ground, and his doctor told him that his kidneys were failing. The ranch is now a National Historic Landmark and is protected in Jack London State Historic Park. A few months before his death, London resigned from the Socialist Party, but stated emphatically he did so "because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle." Debts, alcoholism, illness, and fear of losing his creativity darkened the author's last years. He died on November 22, 1916, officially of gastro-intestinal uremia. However, there have also been speculations that London committed suicide with morphine, but this appears to be at best a rumor, or speculation based on incidents in his fiction writings. Jack London's ashes are buried, together with those of his second wife Charmian (who died in 1955), in Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California. The simple grave is marked only by a mossy boulder. |
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