London, Jack (John) Griffith

London, Jack (John) Griffith (1876–1916), American novelist. He grew up in poverty, scratching a living in various legal and illegal ways and taking part in the Klondike gold rush of 1897. His experiences provided the material for his works, and made him a socialist. The Son of the Wolf (1900), the first of his many collections of tales, is based upon life in the Far North, as is the book that brought him recognition, The Call of the Wild (1903), which tells the story of the dog Buck, who, after his master's death, is lured back to the primitive world to lead a wolf pack. Many other novels followed, including The People of the Abyss (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906), The Iron Heel (1908), South Sea Tales (1911), The Valley of the Moon (1913), and Jerry of the South Seas (1917). The semi-autobiographical Martin Eden (1909) describes the struggles of the protagonist, a sailor and labourer, to acquire education and to become a writer: he succeeds, spectacularly, only to find himself disillusioned with the world he has entered, and he drowns himself on the way to the South Seas. John Barleycorn (1913) is a record of London's own struggle against alcohol. He also wrote socialist treatises, autobiographical essays, and a good deal of journalism.