Jack London

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack London was born on the 12th of January, 1876, in a San Francisco neighborhood that would later burn to the ground in the earthquake of 1906. He died forty years later, on the 22nd of November, 1916, on a sleeping porch of a cottage on his own ranch. In between those two dates he became one of the first American authors to achieve international celebrity, earn a large fortune from writing, serve as a war correspondent, steal oysters, join Coxey's Army, spend thirty days in a penitentiary for vagrancy, cross the Klondike in winter, and lose four front teeth to scurvy. He also wrote some of the most enduring fiction in American literary history. How did the son of a woman who shot herself and a father who denied him get from a working-class Oakland childhood to the top of the commercial fiction world? And what drove a man who told his publisher he wrote only to add acres to his ranch to also close every letter with the words "Yours for the Revolution"?

• 2. Origins and the Road

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  Flora Wellman, London's mother, was living with astrologer William Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. According to her own account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of the 4th of June, 1875, Chaney demanded she have an abortion. When she refused, he denied responsibility for the child, and in desperation she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. After giving birth, she sent the infant to be nursed by a neighbor named Virginia Prentiss, a former slave whom London would later describe as his primary source of love and affection as a child. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and the family eventually settled in Oakland, where the Prentiss family moved with them and remained a stable presence in the young Jack's life.

  London's education was mostly self-directed. In 1885, he found and read a Victorian novel by the writer Ouida, titled Signa, and credited it as the seed of his literary success. The following year, he discovered the Oakland Public Library, where librarian Ina Coolbrith encouraged his reading; she would later become California's first poet laureate. By 1889, London was working twelve to eighteen hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. To escape, he borrowed money from Virginia Prentiss, bought a sloop called the Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate known as French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself.

  After the sloop was damaged beyond repair, he joined the California Fish Patrol, then signed onto the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for the coast of Japan, in 1893. Returning to a country gripped by the panic of that year, he worked in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant before joining Coxey's Army and beginning what he called his career as a tramp. In 1894, he spent thirty days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo, New York. He later wrote of the experience in The Road: "Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen." When he was twenty-one and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, he finally wrote to William Chaney in Chicago asking about his paternity. Chaney replied that he could not be London's father because he was impotent, and casually suggested London's mother had relations with other men. London was devastated. In the months that followed, he quit Berkeley and headed for the Klondike.

• 3. Gold Rush and First Words

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  On the 12th of July, 1897, London and his sister's husband, Captain Shepard, sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush. The conditions were brutal. Like many men in the goldfields, London developed scurvy; his gums swelled, he lost four front teeth, and a constant gnawing pain settled in his hip and leg muscles. A priest known as Father William Judge, called "The Saint of Dawson", ran a facility in Dawson that provided shelter, food, and what medicine was available to London and others. His landlords in the Klondike were brothers Marshall and Louis Bond, mining engineers educated at Yale and Stanford respectively. Marshall Bond's diary records friendly political sparring with London as a camp pastime.

  London came back from the Klondike with something more valuable than gold: material. The short story "To Build a Fire," which many critics regard as his finest, grew directly from his time in the harsh north. He published a tame version in 1902, then a far grimmer revision in 1908; to compare them, as one critic observed in 1994, is an instructive lesson in what distinguishes great literary art from a good children's story. The Klondike also gave London the wolf dog that became The Call of the Wild.

  Back in California in 1898, London threw himself into writing with the same ferocity he had brought to the oyster trade. When The Overland Monthly offered him only five dollars for a story and was slow paying, he nearly quit. He later said he was "literally and literarily saved" when The Black Cat accepted "A Thousand Deaths" and paid him $40, which he called the "first money I ever received for a story." By 1900, he made $2,500 from writing. In early 1903, he sold The Call of the Wild to The Saturday Evening Post for $750 and the book rights to Macmillan, whose promotional campaign propelled it to swift success.

• 4. The Crowd and Its Members

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  George Sterling, the poet London addressed in letters as "Greek" because of his aquiline nose and classical profile, became London's best friend after they met at Lake Merritt in Oakland. London signed his own letters to Sterling as "Wolf." Sterling helped London find a home in Piedmont in 1902, and they became the twin centers of a bohemian circle called The Crowd. The group formed after 1898 and gathered at Xavier Martinez's home on Sundays and at London's home on Wednesdays.

  Historian Alex Kershaw described The Crowd as a bohemian group that spent Sunday afternoons picnicking, reading each other's latest compositions, gossiping about each other's infidelities, and frolicking beneath the cherry boughs in the hills of Piedmont. Its regulars included the poet Ambrose Bierce, photographer Arnold Genthe, dramatist Joseph Noel, poet Joaquin Miller, and Anna Strunsky, with whom London co-authored The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary novel debating two philosophies of love. London wrote the letters arguing a scientific, Darwinian view; Strunsky argued for romance. Love won the argument.

  One meeting point that never made it onto anyone's literary itinerary was Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon, a port-side bar in Oakland where London had studied as a schoolboy. He mentioned the pub's likeness seventeen times in his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn. It was there he met Alexander McLean, a captain notorious for cruelty at sea, who became the model for Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf. Heinold's is now unofficially named Jack London's Rendezvous in his honor.

• 5. The Socialist Candidate

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  London joined the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896, the same year the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the twenty-year-old giving nightly speeches in Oakland's City Hall Park, an activity that got him arrested a year later. He left that party in 1901 and joined the new Socialist Party of America. That same year he ran for mayor of Oakland as the Socialist candidate, receiving 245 votes. In 1905, he ran again and received 981.

  His socialism, he insisted, was not theoretical. In his essay "How I Became a Socialist," he traced his politics directly to his experience at the bottom of what he called the social pit, where individualism was hammered out of him. He saw the work trap clearly and vowed to escape it by selling his brains. He toured the country lecturing on socialism in 1906 and published two essay collections on the subject, War of the Classes in 1905 and Revolution, and other Essays in 1906. His dystopian novel The Iron Heel anticipated and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, according to later critics.

  Yet his commitment frayed over time. California cultural historian Kevin Starr described his later ranch period as "post-socialist" and suggested that by 1911 London was more bored by the class struggle than he cared to admit. In 1916, London resigned from the Glen Ellen chapter of the Socialist Party. George Orwell, who admired the man's work, nonetheless identified in him what he called a fascist strain: a love of violence and physical strength, a belief in natural aristocracy, an exaltation of the primitive. London's political identity never fully resolved those contradictions. Stasz notes that he regarded the Wobblies as a welcome addition to the cause but never joined them in recommending sabotage, and that he met Big Bill Haywood in person in 1912.

• 6. War and Wolf House

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  In early 1904, London accepted an assignment from the San Francisco Examiner to cover the Russo-Japanese War, arriving in Yokohama on the 25th of January. Japanese authorities arrested him in Shimonoseki; he was released through the intervention of American ambassador Lloyd Griscom. Travelling to Korea, he was arrested again for straying too close to the Manchurian border. Released a second time, he was permitted to travel with the Imperial Japanese Army to observe the Battle of the Yalu. He asked newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst to transfer him to the Imperial Russian Army, where he believed reporting restrictions would be lighter. Before that could be arranged, he was arrested a third time, this time for assaulting his Japanese assistants, whom he accused of stealing fodder for his horse. President Theodore Roosevelt intervened personally to secure his release, and London left the front in June 1904.

  In 1905, London purchased a thousand-acre ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain. He wrote that next to his wife, the ranch was the dearest thing in the world to him. He educated himself in agricultural science, hired both Italian and Chinese stonemasons whose distinctly different styles were visible in the buildings, and was proud to own the first concrete silo in California. Critics diverge on how to read the enterprise: sympathetic observers such as Stasz describe the projects as potentially feasible and ascribe their failure to bad luck or to ideas ahead of their time; unsympathetic historians such as Starr argue that London was a bad manager, impaired by alcoholism, absent from the ranch about six months a year between 1910 and 1916.

  London spent $80,000 to build a fifteen-thousand-square-foot stone mansion on the property, which he called Wolf House. Two weeks before he and Charmian planned to move in, just as construction was nearing completion, the mansion burned to the ground. London's ashes were eventually buried near its stone remnants, and the ranch is now a National Historic Landmark protected within Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen.

• 7. Charmian and the Sea

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  London had been introduced to Charmian Kittredge in 1900 by her aunt Netta Eames, an editor at Overland Monthly magazine. The two did not become lovers until years later, after a visit to Netta Eames' Sonoma County resort in 1903, when London was injured falling from a buggy and Charmian was asked to care for him. Charmian was five years his senior. Biographer Russ Kingman called her "Jack's soul-mate, always at his side, and a perfect match." They married in 1905, after his divorce from Bessie Maddern was finalized on the 11th of November, 1904.

  Charmian's aunt and foster mother had raised her as a disciple of Victoria Woodhull, and every biographer notes her uninhibited sexuality as a defining aspect of the marriage. In The Kempton-Wace Letters, London had drawn a contrast between what he called the "Mother Girl" and the "Mate Woman"; his pet name for his first wife Bess had been "Mother-Girl", while his pet name for Charmian was "Mate-Woman." They attempted to have children; one child died at birth and another pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.

  Their life together was lived largely at sea and in motion. In 1907, they sailed on a yacht called the Snark to Hawaii and Australia. London spent his last visit to Hawaii beginning in December 1915, a stay that lasted eight months. There he met Duke Kahanamoku, Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana'ole, and Queen Lili'uokalani. He returned to his ranch in July 1916 already suffering from kidney failure. He died on the 22nd of November, 1916. His funeral on the 26th of November was attended only by close friends, relatives, and workers of the property. After Charmian's death in 1955, she was cremated and buried with her husband under the same mossy boulder he had chosen.

• 8. The Writer and His Range

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  Historian Dale L. Walker wrote that London's true genius lay in the short form, specifically stories of 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed. His novels, Walker added, were hugely flawed by the quickness of a mind too impatient for long form. Ambrose Bierce praised The Sea-Wolf's villain Wolf Larsen as among the greatest things in American fiction, but said the love element was awful. Critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild a beautiful prose poem. Editor Franklin Walker placed it on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn. Novelist E.L. Doctorow called it a mordant parable and London's masterpiece.

  London was candid about his methods. He wrote to Elwyn Hoffman that "expression, you see -- with me -- is far easier than invention." He purchased plot ideas from a young Sinclair Lewis. He acknowledged using Egerton Ryerson Young's book My Dogs in the Northland as a source for The Call of the Wild, claiming to have sent Young a letter of thanks. The most serious plagiarism charge involved Chapter 7 of The Iron Heel, which was nearly identical to an ironic essay Frank Harris had published in 1901. Harris suggested he deserved one-sixtieth of the royalties, calculating the disputed chapter's share of the whole novel. London insisted he had clipped what he believed to be a genuine speech by the Bishop of London from an American newspaper reprint.

  By the end of his life, London had accumulated a personal library of 15,000 volumes, which he called "the tools of my trade." Some nineteen original collections of short stories were published during his brief life or shortly after his death. His most famous credo -- "I would rather be ashes than dust" -- was published via a journalist's account in the San Francisco Bulletin on the 2nd of December, 1916, weeks after his death. Biographer Stasz confirms at least one line is authentic: London wrote it in his own hand in the autograph book of Australian suffragette Vida Goldstein on the 13th of January, 1909, noting that he had first written it seven years earlier. Part of the credo was later used to describe the philosophy of the fictional James Bond in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice in 1964, and again in the film No Time to Die in 2021.