Jack London

Jack London
Jack London

Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was a famous American writer and journalist. He had a traumatic early life, two troubled mar-riages, and a death, possibly due to suicide, shrouded in mystery.

After engaging in “oyster pirating,” becoming a tramp, and getting a grueling, low-paying job, he went to the University of California at Berkeley in 1896, only to stay a year and fail to graduate. He joined the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, during which he developed Scurvy. However, some of his best known and most successful stories, such as the and White Fang, were based on his Gold Rush experiences.

London’s most famous novels are The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden.

In a letter dated Dec 27, 1901, London’s Macmillan publisher George Platt Brett Sr. said: “he believed Jack’s fiction represented ‘the very best kind of work’ done in America.”

Critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild “a beautiful prose poem”; editor Franklin Walker said that it “belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn“; and novelist E.L. Doctorow called it “a mordant parable … his masterpiece.”

Jack London was an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.Dale L. Walker

Some critics have said that his novels are episodic and resemble linked short stories. Dale L. Walker writes:

The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device … Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn … is a synoptic series of short episodes.

Ambrose Bierce said of The Sea-Wolf that “the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen … the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime.” However, he noted, “The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.”

The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel that anticipates and influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. London’s socialist politics are explicitly on display here. The Iron Heel meets the contemporary definition of soft science fiction.

London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. London had been a robust man but had suffered several serious illnesses, including scurvy in the Klondike. Additionally, during travels he may have picked up unspecified tropical infections. At the time of his death, he suffered from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism, and uremia; he was in extreme pain and taking morphine.

London’s ashes were buried on his property not far from the Wolf House. London’s funeral took place on November 26, 1916, attended only by close friends, relatives, and workers of the property. In accordance with his wishes, he was cremated and buried next to some pioneer children, under a rock that belonged to the Wolf House. After Charmian, his wife, death in 1955, she was also cremated and then buried with her husband in the same simple spot that her husband chose. The grave is marked by a mossy boulder. The buildings and property were later preserved as Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California.

Short stories
London’s “strength of utterance” is at its height in his stories, and they are painstakingly well-constructed. “To Build a Fire” is the best known of all his stories. Set in the harsh Klondike, it recounts the haphazard trek of a new arrival who has ignored an old-timer’s warning about the risks of traveling alone. Falling through the ice into a creek in seventy-five-below weather, the unnamed man is keenly aware that survival depends on his untested skills at quickly building a fire to dry his clothes and warm his extremities. After publishing a tame version of this story—with a sunny outcome—in The Youth’s Companion in 1902, London offered a second, more severe take on the man’s predicament in The Century Magazine in 1908. Reading both provides an illustration of London’s growth and maturation as a writer. As Labor (1994) observes: “To compare the two versions is itself an instructive lesson in what distinguished a great work of literary art from a good children’s story.”

Other stories from the Klondike period include: “All Gold Canyon”, about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; “The Law of Life”, about an aging American Indian man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; “Love of Life”, about a trek by a prospector across the Canadian tundra; “To the Man on Trail,” which tells the story of a prospector fleeing the Mounted Police in a sled race, and raises the question of the contrast between written law and morality; and “An Odyssey of the North,” which raises questions of conditional morality, and paints a sympathetic portrait of a man of mixed White and Aleut ancestry.

London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer. “A Piece of Steak” is a tale about a match between older and younger boxers. It contrasts the differing experiences of youth and age but also raises the social question of the treatment of aging workers. “The Mexican” combines boxing with a social theme, as a young Mexican endures an unfair fight and ethnic prejudice in order to earn money with which to aid the revolution.

Some nineteen original collections of short stories were published during London’s brief life or shortly after his death. There have been several posthumous anthologies drawn from this pool of stories. Many of these stories were located in the Klondike and the Pacific. A collection of Jack London’s San Francisco Stories was published in October 2010 by Sydney Samizdat Press.