London, Jack (John Griffith London)

London, Jack (John Griffith London) (1876–1916), born in San Francisco, is said to have been the illegitimate son of William Henry Chaney (1821–1903), an itinerant astrologer. Reared by a family without fixed occupation or residence, he lived along the Oakland waterfront described in Martin Eden and John Barleycorn, and attended school only until he finished grammar school at 14. As a boy he bought a sloop and with some cronies raided the oyster beds about the bay, as he later told in The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). He abandoned this lawless, reckless occupation in 1893, to join a sealing cruise which took him as far as Japan. After a tramping trip through the U.S. and Canada, and a period of education including a semester at the University of California (1896), he returned to the Oakland waterfront with an interest in sociology and the Socialist party, which appears in several of his later books. In 1897 he joined the gold rush to the Klondike, where he made an unsuccessful attempt at mining, came to know the men who were prototypes of his elemental, hard‐living heroes, and continued to read Spencer, Darwin, and Karl Marx. Stricken with scurvy, he returned to Oakland the following year and began to write of his experiences.

His short stories of the Yukon were published in the Overland Monthly (1898) and the Atlantic Monthly (1899), and in 1900 his first collection, The Son of the Wolf, was issued, bringing him national fame for his Kiplingesque portrayal of the brutal, vigorous life of the Far North. He continued to write in this vein, producing an enormous output of stories and novels, and in 1902, with an established reputation, went to London, where he made a close study of slum conditions for his descriptive work The People of the Abyss (1903). The remainder of his short but full life was spent under the balmy influence of popularity and success. He reported the Russo‐Japanese War for the Hearst papers, made lecture tours, went on sailing voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas, was a correspondent for Collier's in Mexico, and lived on his great patriarchal estate in California. His popularity, journalistic training, and eagerness for money caused him to write too prolifically, but his energy and ability as a storyteller gave even his worst writing a great appeal.

Besides several collections of short stories, including Love of Life (1907); Lost Face (1910), in which was printed the popular “To Build a Fire”; South Sea Tales (1911); and On the Makaloa Mat (1919), giving a sense of rugged life close to nature, his longer fiction also showed a deep concern with physical energy, the cult of “red blood,” and a breed of Nietzschean supermen engaged in violent struggles of various sorts. This includes many novels, the best known of which are The Call of the Wild (1903), the story of a dog in the Far North, who escapes from civilization to lead a wolf pack; The Sea‐Wolf (1904), about the powerful, ruthless captain of a sealing ship; The Game (1905), the story of a prizefighter; Before Adam (1906), concerned with the life of prehistoric savages; White Fang (1906) telling of a wild dog who is tamed; Martin Eden (1909), a semi‐autobiographical novel about a writer's struggles; Burning Daylight (1910), the story of Daylight, a man of tremendous energy who wrests a fortune from the Klondike, then idealistically renounces his hard‐won wealth; Smoke Bellew (1912), about a journalist's strenuous adventures in the Yukon; John Barleycorn (1913), an autobiographical memoir intended as propaganda for temperance; and Jerry of the Islands (1917), the story of an Irish setter pup in the South Seas.

London also wrote socialistic treatises, such as War of the Classes (1905) and The Human Drift (1917), as well as novels concerned with socialists and class struggle, of which the most famous are The Iron Heel (1908), prophesying a fascist revolution to be followed eventually by an equalitarian golden age, and The Valley of the Moon (1913), in which the economic problem is solved by a return to the land.

In spite of his belief in collectivism as an inevitable next step in human evolution, London was most convincing in his depiction of individualistic struggle and primitive violence. The very titles of many of his books, e.g. The Strength of the Strong (1911) and The Abysmal Brute (1913), indicate his preoccupation with the concept of the brute which underlies the social behavior of men and animals. Buck, in The Call of the Wild, shows a retrogression, while White Fang and Jerry of the Islands depict the brute under control or in process of subjugation. Wolf Larsen is a combination of civilized brain with primitive force. In The Iron Heel, one of the most impressive scenes shows the people of the abyss fighting with bestial, reckless fury against their oppressors. London worshipped Marx and Nietzsche impartially, grasping what he could of their diametrically opposed theories, and championing now one, now the other, both in his novels and in his own life. London's Letters from 1896 to 1916 were published in three volumes (1989).