Jump to content

Jack London

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Dpbsmith (talk | contribs) at 14:54, 27 September 2003. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Life

Jack London, born John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916), was an [[United >States|American]] author of over 50 books.

He was born in San Francisco, California, and attended the University of California, where he was the editor of the university's literary journal, The Pelican.

On July 25, 1897, London sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he would later write his first successful stories.

On returning to Oakland in 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle which he described in his novel, Martin Eden. His first published story was the fine and frequently anthologized "To the Man On Trail," but The Overland Monthly offered him only $5 for it--and was slow paying. Jack London was close to giving up and abandoning his writing career. In his words, "literally and literarily I was saved" when The Black Cat accepted his story, "A Thousand Deaths," and paid him $40--the "first money I ever received for a story."

Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public, and strong market for short fiction. The first issue of The Atlantic Monthly contained Jack London's story, "An Odyssey of the North." In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, the equivalent of about $50,000 today. His career was well under way.

Socialism

Jack London was a lifelong socialist. In 1896 the San Francisco Chronicle published a story about the 20-year old London who was out nightly in Oakland's City Hall Park, giving speechs on socialism to the crowds--an activity for which he was arrested in 1897. He ran unsuccessfully as the Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland in 1905, toured the country lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published collections of essays on socialism (The War of the Classes, 1905; Revolution, and other Essays, 1910).

He customarily closed his letters "Yours for the Revolution."

A socialist viewpoint is evident throughout his writing, most notably in his novel The Iron Heel. No theorist or intellectual socialist, Jack London's socialism came from the heart and from his life experience.

In his later years he possibly felt some ambivalence toward socialism. He was an extraordinary financial success as a writer, and wanted desperately to make a financial success of his Glen Ellen ranch. He complained about the "inefficient Italian workers" in his employ. In 1916 he resigned from the Glen Ellen chapter of the Socialist Labor Party, but stated emphatically that he did so "because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle."

Death

Jack London's death is controversial. Many older sources describe it as a suicide, and some still do (e.g. the Columbia Encyclopedia at http://www.bartleby.com/65/lo/London-J.html. However, this appears to be at best a rumor, or speculation. His death certificate gives the cause as uremia. It is known that he was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed. The noted London scholar Dr. Clarice Stasz writes at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/jackbio.html that "Following London's death, for a number of reasons a biographical myth developed in which he has been portrayed as an alcoholic womanizer who committed suicide. Recent scholarship based upon firsthand documents challenges this caricature." In his autobiographical novel Martin Eden, the protagonist commits suicide by drowning, a detail which undoubtedly contributed to the myth.

Works

Short Stories

Many readers find Jack London to be at his best in his short stories, of which he wrote about two hundred. London's "strength of utterance" is at its height in his stories, and they are superbly well-constructed. (Many of his novels, including The Call of the Wild, are episodic and resemble linked sequences of short stories).

"To Build a Fire" is the best known of all his stories, and deservedly so. Other fine stories from his Klondike period include: "All Gold Canyon," about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; "The Law of Life," about an aging man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; and "Love of Life," about a desperate trek by a prospector across the Canadian taiga.

"Moon Face" invites comparison with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Jack London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer himself. "A Piece of Steak" is an evocative tale about a match between a older boxer and a younger one. "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 Mexican revolution.

A surprising number of Jack London's stories would today be classified as science fiction. "The Unparalleled Invasion" describes bacteriological warfare against China. "Goliah" revolves around an irresistible energy weapon. "The Shadow and the Flash" is a brilliantly original tale about two competitive brothers who take two different routes to achieving invisibility. "A Relic of the Pliocene" is a tall tale about an encounter of a modern-day man with a mammoth. "The Red One" tells of an island tribe held in thrall by a extraterrestrial object.

Novels

A Daughter of the Snows (1902), Jack London's first novel, is little read today. It is, however, notable for its heroine, Frona Welse (whose name surely echoes that of his mother, Flora Wellman), a strong and self-reliant woman, one of many that would people his fiction. It is also notable for a a "racialist" sensibility that is detectable in some of his work; one of his characters says "We [Anglo-Saxons] are a race of doers and fighters, of globe-encirclers and zone-conquerors.... All that the other races are not, the Anglo-Saxon, or Teuton if you please, is." (Such sentiments were, of course, common currency the time in which he was writing, and appear in the mouths of characters, not the narrator).

The Call of the Wild (1903), is his most familiar book and one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is often mistakenly thought to be particularly suitable for children. The hero, Buck, is a domestic pet who is abducted by thieves and sold to a trainer of sled dogs. In a series of episodes, Buck is forced to survive and adapt to brutal and cruel conditions. He is acquired by a kind and loving (but exploitative) owner, John Thornton. When Thornton is killed by "Yeehat Indians," Buck returns to the wild. Images of death, cruelty, and Darwinian struggle abound; of Buck's new world, London writes "The salient thing of this other world seemed fear."

The Iron Heel (1908) is an anti-utopian novel about the rise of a proto-fascist tyranny in the United States. It is perhaps the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. It is a favorite of many London aficionados. It reminds many readers of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is cited by Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced that work.

Martin Eden (1909) is a fine novel about a writer who bears a extremely strong resemblance to Jack London. This book is, of course, a favorite among writers, who relate to Martin Eden's speculation that when he mailed off a manuscript, "there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps," returning it automatically with a rejection slip.

Nonfiction and Autobiographical Memoirs

"The Road" (1907) is a series of tales and reminiscences of Jack London's hobo days. It relates the tricks that hoboes used to evade train crews, and reminisces about his travels with Kelly's Army. He credits his story-telling skill to the hobo's necessity of concocting tales to coax meals from sympathetic strangers.

Jack London's autobiographical book of "alcoholic memoirs," John Barleycorn, was published in 1913. Recommended by Alcoholics Anonymous, it depicts the outward and inward life of an alcoholic. The passages depicting his interior mental state, which he called the "White Logic," are among his strongest and most evocative writing.

In 2001, his novel Call of the Wild was listed as one of the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library.

Selected bibliography

Biographies and books about Jack London

  • Jack London and His Times, Joan London, 1939 (Doubleday, Doran). By Jack London's daughter. Notable for its background on social and economic conditions in California during various periods in Jack London's life.
  • A Pictorial Biography of Jack London, Russ Kingman, 1979; "Published for Jack London Research Center by David Rejl, California." Incredible wealth of fascinating photographs documenting seemingly every person and place in Jack London's life.
  • Jack London's Women, Clarice Stasz, 2001 (University of Massachusetts Press)

Novels

Stories

Plays

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jack_London&oldid=1489255"