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About JACK LONDON

While still a teen-ager, London was forced to earn money to help support the household. He worked at a series of unskilled jobs but constantly sought a way out of the dead-end life of a "work beast." He sailed the waters of San Francisco Bay, first as an oyster pirate, then as a member of the Fish Patrol, apprehending his former comrades in larceny. In 1893, at the age of 17, he signed on as a seaman with the seal-hunting vessel Sophie Sutherland. The experiences of his seven months at sea not only taught him much about life, but also provided him with raw material for some of his early writings.

In the summer of 1897, still seeking to escape the common laboring life, London sailed for Juneau, determined to strike it rich in the Alaskan gold rush. A year later, broke and ill, perhaps with scurvy, London abandoned his Klondike adventure. He had found no gold dust, but he came away with rich nuggets of experience that inspired some of his best tales. London later wrote of his year in Alaska: "It was in the Klondike that I found myself. There, nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get your perspective. I got mine." In novels like The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), and in short story collections like The Son of the Wolf (his first published book, in 1900), London explored the struggle against nature's indifference and cruel power.

Throughout his life, Jack London held an unshakable faith in mankind. He lived according to this faith, and his writing reflected it. His months as a hobo, tramping across the United States, provided him with the philosophical base for his compassionate socialism and the story is recounted in his book The Road (1907). London's compassion for humanity led him to live for a period among the poor in the East End of London, England, an experience that produced his sociological study, The People of the Abyss (1903). He later wrote that "Of all my books, I love most The People of the Abyss. No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor." London's faith in humankind and his abhorrence of individualism are themes that recur in many of his novels and tales.

As both adventurer and author, London himself often made headlines. But, he also had a journalist's nose for a good story, and he managed to be at the center of some of the world's major events. In 1904, he covered the Russo-Japanese War as a war correspondent for the Hearst newspapers. Despite being arrested and having his camera confiscated, London captured extraordinary views of the war. Two years later, back home in Sonoma, California, Jack London and his wife Charmian woke to the rumbling and rolling of the ground on April 18, 1906. The Londons walked the quake-ravaged city of San Francisco for hours, absorbing and photographing the devastation wrought by the temblors, explosions and fires. The report that London wrote for Collier's is one of the first eyewitness accounts and a simple but eloquent masterpiece of journalism.

In 1906, London began to build a 45-foot yacht for a projected seven-year, round-the-world cruise. On April 23, 1907, Jack and Charmian London and a small crew set sail from San Francisco, bound for the South Pacific. For the next year and a half, the Snark miraculously prevailed despite her design flaws and the inexperience of the crew. After adventures such as savoring the Hawaiian paradise, visiting the leper colony on Molokai, fending off marauding villagers in the Solomon Islands, and nearly perishing from thirst at sea, the ill and weary Londons reluctantly abandoned the voyage in Australia and returned home to California. The story of the voyage, with all its rigors and rewards, is told in London's The Cruise of the Snark (1911).

As he did with his stories of the cold, cruel Klondike, London used the vastly different tropical settings of the South Pacific to explore some of the same themes concerning human conflict and the most fundamental forces of nature. In his story "Koolau the Leper," for example, London tells of the plight of a man who goes into hiding, rather than submit to deportation to Molokai. In the last story London wrote, "The Water Baby," he explores the fundamental conflict between internal, spiritual affirmation and rational skepticism, reflecting London's own inner struggle with these opposing beliefs.

In June, 1905, London wrote to his editor and publisher George Brett about land he had just found in the Sonoma hills: "There are . . . 130 acres of the most beautiful, primitive land to be found anywhere in California. . . . I have been riding all over these hills, looking for just such a place, and I must say that I have never seen anything like it." London eventually owned about 1,400 acres of land, on which he operated an ambitious ranch with his step-sister Eliza London Shepard as superintendent, applying scientific principles to growing record crops and raising champion livestock.

London's ranching venture awakened in him a belief in the redemptive qualities of the land, as well as a commitment to the wise renewal of its natural resources. In this vision of mutual benefits and obligations, humankind can find salvation by returning to nature and her bounty but must also be committed, in London's words, to "making the land better for my having been." London explored this vision in his writings, producing a series of pastoral tales, such as the novels The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Burning Daylight (1910) and short stories like "All Gold Canyon." In contrast to the Klondike stories, in which people are pitted against nature's cruel power, these tales feature a beneficent nature sometimes threatened by human insensitivity.

Throughout his career, Jack London explored ideas, both in his reading and in his own writings, seeking to find the answers to life's great questions. In this quest, he frequently affirmed his own belief in the superiority of humanity over the destructive power of individualism, as in his novels Martin Eden (1909) and The Sea Wolf (1904). He also cast his socialist beliefs toward the future in The Iron Heel (1908), imagining a world in which a ruling party rises to complete domination of the proletariat.

Increasingly, in the last several years of his life, he saw the importance of the inner or spiritual side of life to humankind's self-understanding. His remarkable novel, The Star Rover (1915), is the story of a prisoner whose spirit roams through time and space as an escape from his body's brutal torture. In addition, London's reading of Carl Jung introduced him to concepts of psychology and collective, inner human experience that he described as a "world so new, so terrible, so wonderful, that I am almost afraid to look over into it." London began to incorporate Jung's theories into short stories like "The Water Baby."