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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.
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