JACK LONDON

at The Huntington

Jack London Home

About Jack London

Chronology

Jack London Papers

Collection Highlights

London Links

home > manuscripts > jack london

JACK LONDON

Author and Adventurer

Jack London is known to people the world over as the author of such novels as The Call of the Wild and White Fang. In his short life of just forty years (1876-1916), he pursued a course of larger-than-life adventure as a sailor, tramp, common laborer, prospector, journalist, war correspondent, sociologist, and rancher.

Perhaps inevitably, Jack London's romantic life of adventure has often overshadowed his primary calling -- writing. It is easy to focus on the adventures and on the best-known works and to overlook London's astonishing literary output of fifty books, including novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works. In his adventures, he found many of the characters, settings and situations that would inspire and inform the tales he would write, but he also looked to the scores of books he read throughout his life for the ideas and systems of thought that would shape the raw material gleaned from his own life and adventures.

A proudly self-educated man, London held the conviction that all one needed to know in life could be found in books, and he therefore searched in books for life's most fundamental truths. Armed both with life experiences and with the fruits of his sojourns through the works of the world's greatest thinkers and philosophers, he sought in his own writings to find the answers to life's great questions.

At The Huntington

The Huntington's archive of London's papers, numbering about 60,000 items, is the largest London collection in the world and also by far the largest literary archive of personal papers in the library.

News

Upcoming Event:

The 9th Biennial Jack London Society Symposium

Oct. 9-12, 2008, at The Huntington
For information and symposium details, visit the Jack London Society website.

Now Available

Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer, edited by Sara S. Hodson and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. This volume of scholarly essays joins the Huntington classic, Jack London and the Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer by Franklin Walker with a foreword by Earle Labor. Both titles are available from the Huntington Library Press.