Jack London
American author
pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney
born Jan. 12, 1876, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.
died Nov. 22, 1916, Glen Ellen, Calif.
Main
American novelist and short-story writer whose works deal romantically
with elemental struggles for survival. He is one of the most extensively
translated of American authors.
Deserted by his father, a roving astrologer, London was raised in
Oakland, Calif., by his spiritualist mother and his stepfather, whose
surname, London, he took. At 14 he quit school to escape poverty and
gain adventure. 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 Kelly’s industrial army (one of the
many protest armies of unemployed born of the panic of 1893). He saw
depression conditions, was jailed for vagrancy, 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, and created his own amalgam of socialism and white
superiority. At 19 he crammed a four-year high school course into one
year and entered the University of California at Berkeley, but after a
year he quit school to seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush of 1897.
Returning the next year, still poor and unable to find work, he decided
to earn a living as a writer.
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. The optimism and energy
with which he attacked his task are best conveyed in his
autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909), perhaps his most enduring
work. Within two years stories of his Alaskan adventures, though often
crude, began to win acceptance for their fresh subject matter and virile
force. His first book, The Son of the Wolf (1900), gained a wide
audience. During the remainder of his life he produced steadily,
completing 50 books of fiction and nonfiction in 17 years. Although he
became the highest-paid writer in the United States, 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, Calif., where he built his grandiose Wolf
House. He maintained his socialist beliefs almost to the end of his
life.
Jack London’s hastily written output is of uneven quality. His
Alaskan stories 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. In addition to Martin
Eden, he wrote two other autobiographical novels of considerable
interest: The Road (1907) and John Barleycorn (1913). Other important
works are The Sea Wolf (1904), which features a Nietzschean superman
hero, and The Iron Heel (1907), a fantasy of the future that is a
terrifying anticipation of fascism. London’s reputation declined in the
United States in the 1920s when a brilliant new generation of postwar
writers made the prewar writers seem lacking in sophistication, but his
popularity has remained high throughout the world, 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.