Jack London
Jack London, probably born John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916), was an American author of over 50 books.
Jack London was born in San Francisco, California.
Jack London's biological father is believed by Clarice Stasz and other biographers to have been the astrologer William Chaney. Chaney was in fact a distinguished and respectable figure; according to Stasz, "From the viewpoint of serious astrologers today, Chaney is a major figure who shifted the practice from quackery to a more rigorous method."
Jack London did not learn of Chaney's putative paternity until adulthood. In 1897 he wrote to Chaney and received a letter in which Chaney stated flatly "I was never married to Flora Wellman," and that he was "impotent" during the period in which they lived together and "cannot be your father."
Whether the marriage was, in fact, legalized is unknown. Most San Francisco civil records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. (For the same reason, it is not known with certainty what name appeared on his birth certificate). Stasz notes that in his memoirs Chaney refers to Jack London's mother Flora Wellman, as having been his "wife." Stasz also notes an advertisement in which Flora calls herself "Florence Wellman Chaney."
Jack London was essentially self-taught. In 1883 he found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa, which describes an unschooled Italian peasant child who achieves fame as an opera composer. He credited this as the seed of his literary aspiration.
After graduating from grammar school in 1889, Jack London began working from twelve to eighteen hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out of this gruelling labor, he borrowed money from his black foster mother Jennie Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. In John Barleycorn he claims to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie. After a few months his sloop became damaged beyond repair. He switched to the side of the law and became a member of the California Fish Patrol.
In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland, bound for the coast of Japan. When he returned, the country was in the grip of the panic of '93 and Oakland was swept by labor unrest. After gruelling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly's industrial army and began his career as a tramp.
In 1894, he spent thirty days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo. In The Road, he wrote:
After many experiences as a hobo, sailor, and member of Kelly's Army he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School, where he contributed a number of articles to the high school's magazine, The Aegis.
Jack London desperately wanted to attend the University of California and, in 1896 after a summer of intense cramming, did so; but financial circumstances forced him to leave in 1897 and he never graduated. Biographer Russ Kingman says that "there is no record that Jack ever wrote for student publications" there.
In later life Jack London was a polymath with wide-ranging interests and a personal library of 15,000 volumes.
On July 25, 1897, London sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he would later write his first successful stories. Jack left Oakland a believer in the work ethic, and returned a socialist. He also concluded that his only hope of escaping the work trap was to get an education and "sell his brains." Throughout his life he saw writing as a business, his ticket out of poverty, and, he hoped, a means of beating the wealthy at their own game.
On returning to Oakland in 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel, Martin Eden. His first published story was the fine and frequently anthologized "To the Man On Trail." When The Overland Monthly offered him only $5 for it—and was slow paying—Jack London came close to 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 a 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.
In 1910 Jack London purchased a thousand-acre ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California for $26,000. He wrote that "Next to my wife, the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me." He desperately wanted the ranch to become a successful business enterprise. Writing, always a commercial enterprise with London, now became even more a means to an end: "I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate." After 1910, his literary works were mostly potboilers, written out of the need to provide operating income for the ranch. Joan London writes "Few reviewers bothered any more to criticize his work seriously, for it was obvious that Jack was no longer exerting himself."
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 speeches 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."
Jack London's death is controversial. Many older sources describe it as a suicide, and some still do (e.g., the Columbia Encyclopedia [1]). 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 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."[1] In his autobiographical novel Martin Eden, the protagonist commits suicide by drowning, a detail which undoubtedly contributed to the myth.
Jack London's ashes are buried, together with those of his wife Charmian, in Jack London State Park, in Glen Ellen, California. The simple grave is marked only by a mossy boulder.
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 painstakingly well-constructed. (In contrast, many of his novels, including The Call of the Wild, are weakly constructed, episodic, and resemble linked sequences of short stories).
"To Build a Fire" is the best known of all his stories, probably 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 highly 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.
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). Frona is a strong and self-reliant woman, one of many who would people his fiction. It is also notable for a "racialist" sensibility which is also detectable in some of his other work. A character says "We 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 common currency in Jack London's time and he places them in the mouths of characters, not the narrator).
Call of the Wild (1903), is his most familiar book and considered 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 eventually 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 the new world Buck enters, London writes "The salient thing of this other world seemed fear."
The Sea-Wolf (1904), regarded by some as his greatest novel, gives us Wolf Larsen, the most powerful and memorable character in all of Jack London's fiction. Like The Call of the Wild, it tells the story of a soft, domesticated creature forced to become tough and self-reliant by exposure to cruelty and brutality. In this case, the creature is human: a literary intellectual named Humphrey van Weyden. Onboard a San Francisco ferry which collides with a ship in the fog and sinks, he is picked up ("rescued" is not the word) by Wolf Larsen. Larsen is the captain of the seal-hunting schooner Ghost, bound for Japan. Larsen forces van Weyden to become a cabin boy, do menial work, and learn to fight to protect himself from a brutal crew.
The name "Wolf Larsen" was that of a real sailor Jack had known. Nevertheless, Jack was called "Wolf" by his close friends, used a picture of a wolf on his bookplate, and named his mansion "Wolf House." One may be excused for imagining that the autodidact sailor Wolf Larsen bears some resemblance to the autodidact sailor Jack London. (Hump's experiences also doubtless bear some resemblance to experiences Jack had, or heard told about, when he sailed on the Sophia Sutherland). Jack London insisted that The Sea-Wolf was "an attack on Nietzsche's super-man philosophy." But somehow Wolf Larsen gets all the good lines, and he, not Hump, is the hero of the book. (Star billing is given to the actor playing Wolf Larsen in seven motion pictures adapted from the book).
Unfortunately, the last quarter of the book, when Wolf Larsen has left the stage and we are left only with Humphrey and Maud, is weak and ludicrously prudish. (Two acknowledged lovers, literally cast away on an island, go to enormous effort to build two separate huts). The prudery may have been dictated by commercial considerations, but modern readers are likely to agree with London's contemporary, Ambrose Bierce, who wrote
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 an 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.
The Valley of the Moon (1913) is uneven. It is notable for the portion dealing with a working-class couple struggling in Oakland, and for the scenes in which the proletarian hero enjoys fellowship with the artists' colony in Carmel.
The Little Lady of the Big House (1915) is interesting as a roman à clef. Biographer Clarice Stasz states that it is "not autobiography," but speaks of his "frank borrowing from his life with Charmian" and says it is "psychologically valid as a mirror of events during [the] winter [of 1912-13]. The story concerns a love triangle. The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is a rancher with a poetic streak (his "acorn song" recalls London's play, "The Acorn Planters."). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious, athletic, and sexually self-aware woman (in one scene, she rides a stallion into a "swimming tank," emerging in "a white silken slip of a bathing suit that molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery." Paula, like Charmian, is subject to insomnia; and Paula, like Charmian, is unable to bear children. Based on a reading of Charmian's diary, Stasz identifies the third vertex of the triangle, Evan Graham, with two real-life men named Laurie Smith and Allan Dunn. Even minor characters can be identified; Forrest's servant Oh My resembles London's valet Nakata. The long-bearded hobo philosopher Aaron Hancock resembles the real-life long-bearded hobo philosopher Frank Strawn-Hamilton, who was a long-term guest at the London ranch. Sculptor Haakan Frolich makes an appearance as "the sculptor Froelig"—and painter Xavier Martinez appears as the character "Xavier Martinez!"
London said of this novel: "It is all sex from start to finish—in which no sexual adventure is actually achieved or comes within a million miles of being achieved, and in which, nevertheless, is all the guts of sex, coupled with strength." One reviewer disparaged the novel's "erotomania." (Modern readers will find it coy rather than titillating). The novel ends with Paula accidentally wounding herself mortally with a rifle and convincing a doctor to inject her with an overdose of morphine. As she drifts off, she says goodbye to both of her lovers: “Two bonnie, bonnie men. Good-by, bonnie men. Good-by, Red Cloud.... Stretch the skin tight, first. You know I don’t like to be hurt."
The Star Rover (1915) (published in England as The Jacket), is a story of reincarnation. It evokes divided opinion; many London aficionados esteem it highly. It is unlike any other Jack London novel. A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives. The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are in effect a series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved, short stories. The writing sometimes rises to the level of poetry, sometimes sinks to the level of purple prose.
"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. The question must, however, be raised: is it truly against alcohol, or a love hymn to alcohol? He makes alcohol sound exciting, dangerous, comradely, glamorous, manly. Alcohol is his adventure, like his other adventures—an integral part of his other adventures. In the end, when he sums it up, this is the total he comes up with:
Personal background
Early life
A pivotal event was his discovery in 1895 of the Oakland Public Library and a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith (who later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community).Early literary career (1898-1900)
Beauty Ranch (1910-1917)
Political views
Death
Grave of Jack and Charmian LondonWorks
Short Stories
Novels
A Daughter of the Snows (1902)
Call of the Wild (1903)
The Sea-Wolf (1904)
Bierce also complained that "London has a pretty bad style and no sense of proportion." Nevertheless, even he acknowledged that The Iron Heel (1908)
Martin Eden (1909)
The Valley of the Moon (1913)
The Little Lady of the Big House (1915)
The Star Rover (1915)
Nonfiction and Autobiographical Memoirs
The Cruise of the Snark (1913) is a memoir of Jack and Charmian London's 1907-1909 voyage across the Pacific. His descriptions of "surf-riding," which he dubbed a "royal sport," helped introduce it to and popularize it with the mainland. London writes:
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
Novels
(Links are to the copies of the works at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu)
Stories
Plays
External Links
