Jack London was a jailbird. A hobo. A sailor, seal hunter, pirate, gold-miner, laundered, yachtsman, and coal shoveler. He was a drinker, a brawler, and a heavy smoker. He was a husband (twice) and a father (twice).
He was a socialist candidate for mayor of Oakland, California.
He was a rancher. A world-traveler. A voracious reader. A loyal correspondent whose collected letters fill three large volumes. A lecturer whose fiery speeches ignited controversy where ever he went. A journalist who covered wars and sporting events and natural catastrophes.
He was an author of fifty books dealing with subjects as varied as sailing, boxing, out-of-body experiences, dogs, ranching, and Hawaii. He wrote about gold mining and animal rights, architecture and war, earthquake and fire, alcoholism and leprosy, surfing and socialism. He wrote one novel set in a prehistoric civilization, another set many centuries in the future. He wrote a murder mystery; he wrote a short novel about a devastating disease that wipes out nearly all-human life. He wrote what may be the first “novelization” of a movie. He wrote about survival and love and loneliness, about fairness and unfairness, about right and wrong.
He exhumed our past, examined our present, and predicted our future. And at the age of forty he was dead. Child 1. Throughout Jack London’s boyhood, his stepfather – a friendly, gentleman – failed at a variety of occupations, forcing the little family to move frequently. By the time Jack was five years old, he had lived in nine different houses. Midlife 2. In 1905 the London’s began buying ranch land in the Valley of the Moon region near Glen Ellen, California, about forty miles north of San Francisco.
The Essay on Jack London
... leprosy. The journey also gave London material for books he would write on Melanesian and Polynesian cultures. Jack Londons best novel, The Sea Wolf, ... was based on experiences at sea. Jack Londons love life ...
Jack had become greatly interested in agriculture and wanted to make his ranch a self-supporting community. Although there was an old ranch house already on the property, the London’s planned to build a large stone home to be called Wolf House. On August 22, 1913, just as they were preparing to move in, a fire destroyed the building. For many years the origin of the fire was a mystery. But forensic scientists have recently determined that workers applying a finish to a fireplace mantel forgot to take with them their rags soaked in linseed oil. These rags ignited by spontaneous combustion.
Wolf House had been insured for only a fraction of its original cost, and London did not have the money to rebuild it. Today the Jack London State Historical Park comprises much of the original ranch, and ruins of the Wolf House can still be seen. London wrote a number of stories set in his beloved Glen Ellen including the Valley of the Moon, 1913. 5.Today some of London’s ideas seem out of fashion and occasionally offensive. And some of his writing s, for example, he expresses an excessive pride in his Anglo Saxon heritage that makes modern readers feel uncomfortable. Jack London, however, grew up in a country in which slavery had only recently been abolished.
A country in which the predominately white population was at war with the Plains Indians. He lived in a time when magazines and newspapers of the day were openly racist. 5. The greatest story Jack London ever wrote Alfred Kazin observed On Native Ground, was the story he lived. London is one of those writers whose lives seem to fascinate readers more than their art. His personal drama was the stuff of a Horatio Alger rags to riches, a poor boys rise to world fame and great wealth-but with the ironic ending that it makes a cautionary lesson in the price exacted for persuading the Goddess successes. London’s career constituted one of the darkest chronicles in our literary annals wrote Maxwell Geismar, who agreed in Rebels and Ancestors that “the drama of his life, bold, sensational, tragic, has almost obscured the history of his writing, and his works has been ignored”.
