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writer Jack London
USINFO | 2013-06-08 14:17
Jack London
John Griffith Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney,January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916)was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories To Build a Fire, An Odyssey of the North, and Love of Life.He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen, and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.
London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.
Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist claiming to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.
Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe that London's father was astrologer William Chaney.Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown. Most San Francisco civil records were destroyed by the extensive fires that followed the 1906 earthquake; nobody knows what name appeared on his birth certificate. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to London's mother Flora Wellman as having been his wife and also cites an advertisement in which Flora called herself Florence Wellman Chaney.
According to Flora Wellman's account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. When she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. After she gave birth, Flora turned the baby over to ex-slave Virginia Prentiss, who remained a major maternal figure throughout London's life. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby John, later known as Jack, to live with the newly married couple. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London completed grade school.
In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney responded that he could not be London's father because he was impotent; he casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted on an abortion. He concluded that he was more to be pitied than London.London was devastated by his father's letter. In the months following, he quit school at Berkeley and went to the Klondike.
Early life
London at the age of nine with his dog Rollo, 1885
London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. The house burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the California Historical Society placed a plaque at the site in 1953. Although the family was working class, it was not as impoverished as London's later accounts claimed. London was essentially self-educated.
In 1885, London found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa. He credited this as the seed of his literary success.In 1886, he went to the Oakland Public Library and found a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who encouraged his learning. (She later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community).
In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his black foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate. In his memoir, John Barleycorn, he claims to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie.After a few months, his sloop became damaged beyond repair. London became hired as a member of the California Fish Patrol.
In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophie 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 grueling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly's Army and began his career as a tramp. In 1894, he spent 30 days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo. In The Road, he wrote
Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say 'unprintable'; and in justice I must also say undescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them.
After many experiences as a hobo and a sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School. He contributed a number of articles to the high school's magazine, The Aegis. His first published work was Typhoon off the Coast of Japan, an account of his sailing experiences.
Jack London studying at Heinold's First and Last Chance in 1886
As a schoolboy, London often studied at Heinold's First and Last Chance, a port-side bar in Oakland. At 17, he confessed to the bar's owner, John Heinold, his desire to attend University and pursue a career as a writer. Heinold lent London tuition money to attend college.
London desperately wanted to attend the University of California, Berkeley. In 1896, after a summer of intense studying to pass certification exams, he was admitted. Financial circumstances forced him to leave in 1897 and he never graduated. No evidence suggests that London wrote for student publications while studying at Berkeley.
Heinold's First and Last Chance, Jack London's Rendezvous
While at Berkeley, London continued to study and spend time at Heinold's saloon where he was introduced to the sailors and adventurers who would influence his writing. In his autobiographical novel, John Barleycorn, London mentioned the pub's likeness seventeen times. Heinold's was the place where London met Alexander McLean, a captain known for his cruelty at sea,[16] on whom the protagonist in London's novel The Sea-Wolf, Wolf Larsen, is based.
Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon is now unofficially named Jack London's Rendezvous in his honor.
Gold rush and first success
Miners and prospectors ascend the Chilkoot Trail during the Klondike Gold Rush
On July 12, 1897, London (age 21) and his sister's husband Captain Shepard sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush. This was the setting for some of his first successful stories. London's time in the Klondike, however, was detrimental to his health. Like so many other men who were malnourished in the goldfields, London developed scurvy. His gums became swollen, leading to the loss of his four front teeth. A constant gnawing pain affected his hip and leg muscles, and his face was stricken with marks that always reminded him of the struggles he faced in the Klondike. Father William Judge, The Saint of Dawson, had a facility in Dawson that provided shelter, food and any available medicine to London and others. His struggles there inspired London's short story, To Build a Fire, which many critics assess as his best.
His landlords in Dawson were mining engineers Marshall Latham Bond and Louis Whitford Bond, educated at Yale and Stanford. The brothers' father, Judge Hiram Bond, was a wealthy mining investor. The Bonds, especially Hiram, were active Republicans. Marshall Bond's diary mentions friendly sparring with London on political issues as a camp pastime.
London left Oakland with a social conscience and socialist leanings; he returned to become an activist for socialism. He concluded that his only hope of escaping the work trap was to get an education and sell his brains. He saw his 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 California in 1898, London began working deliberately to get published, a struggle described in his novel, Martin Eden. His first published story was To the Man On Trail, which has frequently been collected in anthologies. When The Overland Monthly offered him only five dollars for it—and was slow paying—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.
London began his writing career 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. In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, about $69,000 in today's currency. Among the works he sold to magazines was a short story known as either Bâtard or Diable, in two editions of the same basic story. A cruel French Canadian brutalizes his dog. The dog retaliates and kills the man. London told some of his critics that man's actions are the main cause of the behavior of their animals, and he would show this in another short story which was to be The Call of the Wild.
George Sterling, Mary Austin, Jack London, and Jimmie Hooper on the beach at Carmel, California
In early 1903, London sold The Call of the Wild to The Saturday Evening Post for $750, and the book rights to Macmillan for $2,000. Macmillan's promotional campaign propelled it to swift success.
While living at his rented villa on Lake Merritt in Oakland, London met poet George Sterling and in time they became best friends. In 1902, Sterling helped London find a home closer to his own in nearby Piedmont. In his letters London addressed Sterling as Greek, owing to his aquiline nose and classical profile, and signed them as Wolf. London was later to depict Sterling as Russ Brissenden in his autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1910) and as Mark Hall in The Valley of the Moon (1913).
In later life London indulged his wide-ranging interests by accumulating a personal library of 15,000 volumes. He referred to his books as the tools of my trade.
First marriage (1900–1904)
Jack with daughters Becky (left) and Joan (right)
Bessie Maddern London and daughters, Joan and Becky
London married Elizabeth Bessie Maddern on April 7, 1900, the same day The Son of the Wolf was edited. Bess had been part of his circle of friends for a number of years. She was related to stage actresses Minnie Maddern Fiske and Emily Stevens. Stasz says, Both acknowledged publicly that they were not marrying out of love, but from friendship and a belief that they would produce sturdy children.,Kingman says, they were comfortable together... Jack had made it clear to Bessie that he did not love her, but that he liked her enough to make a successful marriage.During the marriage, London continued his friendship with Anna Strunsky, co-authoring The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary novel contrasting two philosophies of love. Anna, writing Dane Kempton's letters, arguing for a romantic view of marriage, while London, writing Herbert Wace's letters, argued for a scientific view, based on Darwinism and eugenics. In the novel, his fictional character contrasted two women he had known.
London's pet name for Bess was Mother-Girl and Bess's for London was Daddy-Boy.Their first child, Joan, was born on January 15, 1901, and their second, Bessie (later called Becky), on October 20, 1902. Both children were born in Piedmont, California. Here London wrote one of his most celebrated works, The Call of the Wild.
While London had pride in his children, the marriage was under strain. Kingman says that by 1903, they were close to separation as they were extremely incompatible. Nevertheless, Jack was still so kind and gentle with Bessie that when Cloudsley Johns was a house guest in February 1903 he didn't suspect a breakup of their marriage.
London reportedly complained to friends Joseph Noel and George Sterling
[Bessie] is devoted to purity. When I tell her morality is only evidence of low blood pressure, she hates me. She'd sell me and the children out for her damned purity. It's terrible. Every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won't let me be in the same room with her if she can help it.
Stasz writes that these were code words for [Bess's] fear that [Jack] was consorting with prostitutes and might bring home venereal disease.On July 24, 1903, London told Bessie he was leaving and moved out. During 1904, London and Bess negotiated the terms of a divorce, and the decree was granted on November 11, 1904.
Bohemian Club
London (right) at the Bohemian Grove with his friends Porter Garnett and George Sterling; a painting parodies his story The White Silence
On August 18, 1904, London went with his close friend, the poet George Sterling, to Summer High Jinks at the Bohemian Grove. London was elected to honorary membership in the Bohemian Club and took part in many activities. Other noted members of the Bohemian Club during this time included Ambrose Bierce, Allan Dunn, John Muir, Gelett Burgess, and Frank Norris.
Beginning in December 1914, London worked on The Acorn Planter, A California Forest Play, to be performed as one of the annual Grove Plays, but it was never selected—it was described as too difficult to set to music.London published The Acorn Planter in 1916.
Second marriage
Jack and Charmian London (ca. 1915) at Waikiki
After divorcing Maddern, London married Charmian Kittredge in 1905. London was introduced to Kittredge by his MacMillan publisher, George Platt Brett, Sr., while Kittredge served as Brett's secretary. Biographer Russ Kingman called Charmian Jack's soul-mate, always at his side, and a perfect match. Their time together included numerous trips, including a 1907 cruise on the yacht Snark to Hawaii and Australia.Many of London's stories are based on his visits to Hawaii, the last one for 10 months beginning in December 1915.The couple also visited Goldfield, Nevada, in 1907, where they were guests of the Bond brothers, London's Dawson City landlords. The Bond brothers were working in Nevada as mining engineers.
London had contrasted the concepts of the Mother Woman and the Mate Woman in The Kempton-Wace Letters. His pet name for Bess had been mother-girl; his pet name for Charmian was mate-woman.[31] Charmian's aunt and foster mother, a disciple of Victoria Woodhull, had raised her without prudishness.Every biographer alludes to Charmian's uninhibited sexuality.
The Snark in Australia, 1921
Joseph Noel calls the events from 1903 to 1905 a domestic drama that would have intrigued the pen of an Ibsen.... London's had comedy relief in it and a sort of easy-going romance.In broad outline, London was restless in his marriage; sought extramarital sexual affairs; and found, in Charmian Kittredge, not only a sexually active and adventurous partner, but his future life-companion. They attempted to have children. One child died at birth, and another pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.
In 1906, London published in Collier's magazine his eye-witness report of the San Francisco earthquake.
Beauty Ranch (1905–1916)
The old Winery Cottage, where London died (in the left sleeping porch) on November 22, 1916
In 1905, London purchased a 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California, on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain, for $26,450. 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 for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. 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.
London in 1914
Stasz writes that London had taken fully to heart the vision, expressed in his agrarian fiction, of the land as the closest earthly version of Eden ... he educated himself through the study of agricultural manuals and scientific tomes. He conceived of a system of ranching that today would be praised for its ecological wisdom.[citation needed] He was proud to own the first concrete silo in California, a circular piggery that he designed. He hoped to adapt the wisdom of Asian sustainable agriculture to the United States. He hired both Italian and Chinese stonemasons, whose distinctly different styles are obvious.
The ranch was an economic failure. Sympathetic observers such as Stasz treat his projects as potentially feasible, and ascribe their failure to bad luck or to being ahead of their time. Unsympathetic historians such as Kevin Starr suggest that he was a bad manager, distracted by other concerns and impaired by his alcoholism. Starr notes that London was absent from his ranch about six months a year between 1910 and 1916, and says, He liked the show of managerial power, but not grinding attention to detail .... London's workers laughed at his efforts to play big-time rancher [and considered] the operation a rich man's hobby.
London spent $80,000 ($2,040,000 in current value) to build a 15,000-square-foot (1,400 m2) stone mansion (Wolf House) on the property. Just as the mansion was nearing completion, two weeks before the Londons planned to move in, it was destroyed by fire.
London's last visit to Hawaii,[36] beginning in December 1915, lasted eight months. He met with Duke Kahanamoku, Prince Jonah Kalaniana'ole, Queen Lili‘uokalani and many others, before returning to his ranch in July 1916.He was suffering from kidney failure, but he continued to work.
The ranch (abutting stone remnants of Wolf House) is now a National Historic Landmark and is protected in Jack London State Historic Park.
Death
Grave of Jack and Charmian London
Many older sources describe London's death as a suicide, and some still do.This conjecture appears to be a rumor, or speculation based on incidents in his fiction writings. His death certificate[38] gives the cause as uremia, following acute renal colic, a type of pain often described as the worst pain...ever experienced,commonly caused by kidney stones. Uremia is also known as uremic poisoning.
London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. He was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed to his death. The biographer Stasz writes, 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.
London's fiction featured several suicides. In his autobiographical memoir John Barleycorn, he claims, as a youth, to have drunkenly stumbled overboard into the San Francisco Bay, some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. He said he drifted and nearly succeeded in drowning before sobering up and being rescued by fishermen. In the dénouement of The Little Lady of the Big House, the heroine, confronted by the pain of a mortal gunshot wound, undergoes a physician-assisted suicide by morphine. Also, in Martin Eden, the principal protagonist, who shares certain characteristics with London himself, drowns himself.
London had been a robust man but had suffered several serious illnesses, including scurvy in the Klondike. At the time of his death, he suffered from dysentery and uremia and late stage alcoholism. During travels on the Snark, he and Charmian may have picked up unspecified tropical infections. Most biographers, including Russ Kingman, now agree he died of uremia aggravated by an accidental morphine overdose.
London's ashes were buried, together with those of his second wife Charmian (who died in 1955), in Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California. The simple grave is marked by only a mossy boulder.
Accusations of plagiarism
Jack London in his office
London was vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism not only because he was such a conspicuous, prolific, and successful writer, but also because of his methods of working. He wrote in a letter to Elwyn Hoffman, expression, you see—with me—is far easier than invention. He purchased plots and novels from the young Sinclair Lewis and used incidents from newspaper clippings as writing material.
Egerton R. Young claimed The Call of the Wild was taken from his book My Dogs in the Northland. London acknowledged using it as a source and claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking him.
In July 1901, two pieces of fiction appeared within the same month London's Moon-Face, in the San Francisco Argonaut, and Frank Norris's The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock, in Century. Newspapers showed the similarities between the stories, which London said were quite different in manner of treatment, [but] patently the same in foundation and motive.London explained both writers based their stories on the same newspaper account. A year later, it was discovered that Charles Forrest McLean had published a fictional story also based on the same incident.
In 1906, the New York World published deadly parallel columns showing eighteen passages from London's short story Love of Life side by side with similar passages from a nonfiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald, titled Lost in the Land of the Midnight Sun.London noted the World did not accuse him of plagiarism, but only of identity of time and situation, to which he defiantly pled guilty.
The most serious charge of plagiarism was based on London's The Bishop's Vision, Chapter 7 of his The Iron Heel. The chapter is nearly identical to an ironic essay that Frank Harris published in 1901, titled The Bishop of London and Public Morality.[45] Harris was incensed and suggested he should receive 160th of the royalties from The Iron Heel, the disputed material constituting about that fraction of the whole novel. London insisted he had clipped a reprint of the article, which had appeared in an American newspaper, and believed it to be a genuine speech delivered by the Bishop of London.
Views
Socialism
London wrote from a socialist viewpoint, which is evident in his novel The Iron Heel. Neither a theorist nor an intellectual socialist, London's socialism grew out of his life experience. As London explained in his essay, How I Became a Socialist,his views were influenced by his experience with people at the bottom of the social pit. His optimism and individualism faded, and he vowed never to do more hard physical work than necessary. He wrote that his individualism was hammered out of him, and he was politically reborn. He often closed his letters Yours for the Revolution.London joined the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. In the same year, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story about the twenty-year-old London giving nightly speeches in Oakland's City Hall Park, an activity he was arrested for a year later. In 1901, he left the Socialist Labor Party and joined the new Socialist Party of America. He ran unsuccessfully as the high-profile Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland in 1901 (receiving 245 votes) and 1905 (improving to 981 votes), toured the country lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published two collections of essays about socialism The War of the Classes (1905) and Revolution, and other Essays (1906).
Stasz notes that London regarded the Wobblies as a welcome addition to the Socialist cause, although he never joined them in going so far as to recommend sabotage.Stasz mentions a personal meeting between London and Big Bill Haywood in 1912.[49]
In his late (1913) book The Cruise of the Snark, London writes, about appeals to him for membership of the Snark's crew from office workers and other toilers who longed for escape from the cities, and of being cheated by workmen.
In his Glen Ellen ranch years, London felt some ambivalence toward socialism and complained about the inefficient Italian labourers in his employ.In 1916, he resigned from the Glen Ellen chapter of the Socialist Party, but stated emphatically he did so because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle. In an unflattering portrait of London's ranch days, California cultural historian Kevin Starr refers to this period as post-socialist and says ... by 1911 ... London was more bored by the class struggle than he cared to admit. Starr maintains London's socialism
always had a streak of elitism in it, and a good deal of pose. He liked to play working class intellectual when it suited his purpose. Invited to a prominent Piedmont house, he featured a flannel shirt, but, as someone there remarked, London's badge of solidarity with the working class looked as if it had been specially laundered for the occasion. [Mark Twain said] It would serve this man London right to have the working class get control of things. He would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties.
Racial views
London shared common Californian concerns about Asian immigration and the yellow peril, which he used as the title of a 1904 essay.This theme was also the subject of a story he wrote in 1910 called The Unparalleled Invasion. Presented as a historical essay narrating events between 1976 and 1987, the story describes a China with an ever-increasing population taking over and colonizing its neighbors, with the intention of taking over the entire Earth. The western nations respond with biological warfare and bombard China with dozens of the most infectious diseases.
Many of London's short stories are notable for their empathetic portrayal of Mexican (The Mexican), Asian (The Chinago), and Hawaiian (Koolau the Leper) characters. London's war correspondence from the Russo-Japanese War, as well as his unfinished novel Cherry, show he admired much about Japanese customs and capabilities,which has lead to big popularity of London (considered a Japanophile) among the Japanese, who consider themselve rather positively portrayed by him.
In London's 1902 novel Daughter of the Snows, the character Frona Welse has a speech about Teutonic virtues in contrast to the characteristics of other races. The scholar Andrew Furer, in a long essay exploring the complexity of London's views, says there is no doubt that Frona Welse is acting as a mouthpiece for London in this passage.
London's 1904 essay, The Yellow Peril,criticizes Asians. He admits, it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.
In Koolau the Leper, London describes Koolau, who is a Hawaiian leper—and thus a very different sort of superman than Martin Eden—and who fights off an entire cavalry troop to elude capture, as indomitable spiritually—a ... magnificent rebel. This character is based on Hawaiian leper Kaluaikoolau who revolted and resisted capture from forces of the Provisional Government of Hawaii in the Kalalau Valley in 1893.
Jeffries (left) vs. Johnson, 1910
An amateur boxer and avid boxing fan, London reported on the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight, in which the black boxer Jack Johnson vanquished Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope. In 1908, according to Furer, London praised Johnson highly, contrasting the black boxer's coolness and intellectual style, with the apelike appearance and fighting style of his white opponent, Tommy Burns what on Saturday was bigness, coolness, quickness, cleverness, and vast physical superiority... Because a white man wishes a white man to win, this should not prevent him from giving absolute credit to the best man, even when that best man was black. All hail to Johnson. Johnson was superb. He was impregnable as inaccessible as Mont Blanc.Those who defend London against charges of racism cite the letter he wrote to the Japanese-American Commercial Weekly in 1913
In reply to yours of August 16, 1913. First of all, I should say by stopping the stupid newspaper from always fomenting race prejudice. This of course, being impossible, I would say, next, by educating the people of Japan so that they will be too intelligently tolerant to respond to any call to race prejudice. And, finally, by realizing, in industry and government, of socialism—which last word is merely a word that stands for the actual application of in the affairs of men of the theory of the Brotherhood of Man.
In the meantime the nations and races are only unruly boys who have not yet grown to the stature of men. So we must expect them to do unruly and boisterous things at times. And, just as boys grow up, so the races of mankind will grow up and laugh when they look back upon their childish quarrels.
In Yukon in 1996, after the City of Whitehorse renamed two streets to honor London and Robert W. Service, protests over London's allaged racism forced the city to change the name of Jack London Boulevard back to Two-mile Hill.
Works
Short stories
Western writer and historian Dale L. Walker writes.
London's true métier was the short story ... London's true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed. His stories that run longer than the magic 7,500 generally—but certainly not always—could have benefited from self-editing.
London's strength of utterance is at its height in his stories, and they are painstakingly well-constructed.[citation needed] To Build a Fire is the best known of all his stories. Set in the harsh Klondike, it recounts the haphazard trek of a new arrival who has ignored an old-timer's warning about the risks of traveling alone. Falling through the ice into a creek in seventy-five-below weather, the unnamed man is keenly aware that survival depends on his untested skills at quickly building a fire to dry his clothes and warm his extremities. After publishing a tame version of this story—with a sunny outcome—in The Youth's Companion in 1902, London offered a second, more severe take on the man's predicament in The Century Magazine in 1908. Reading both provides an illustration of London's growth and maturation as a writer. As Labor (1994) observes To compare the two versions is itself an instructive lesson in what distinguished a great work of literary art from a good children's story.
Other stories from the Klondike period include All Gold Canyon, about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; The Law of Life, about an aging American Indian man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; Love of Life, about a trek by a prospector across the Canadian tundra; To the Man on Trail, which tells the story of a prospector fleeing the Mounted Police in a sled race, and raises the question of the contrast between written law and morality; and An Odyssey of the North, which raises questions of conditional morality, and paints a sympathetic portrait of a man of mixed White and Aleut ancestry.
London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer. A Piece of Steak is a tale about a match between older and younger boxers. It contrasts the differing experiences of youth and age but also raises the social question of the treatment of aging workers. 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 revolution.
Numerous stories of London would today be classified as science fiction. The Unparalleled Invasion describes germ warfare against China; Goliah revolves around an irresistible energy weapon; The Shadow and the Flash is a tale about two brothers who take 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 is a late story from a period when London was intrigued by the theories of the psychiatrist and writer Jung. It tells of an island tribe held in thrall by an extraterrestrial object. His dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, meets the contemporary definition of soft science fiction.
Some nineteen original collections of short stories were published during London's brief life or shortly after his death. There have been numerous posthumous anthologies drawn from this pool of nineteen books. Many of these collections have been themed around the locales of the Klondike and the Pacific. A collection of Jack London's San Francisco Stories was published in October 2010 by Sydney Samizdat Press.[61]
Novels
London writing, 1905
London's most famous novels are The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden.
In a letter dated Dec 27, 1901, London's Macmillan publisher George Platt Brett, Sr. said he believed Jack's fiction represented 'the very best kind of work' done in America.
Critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild a beautiful prose poem; editor Franklin Walker said that it belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn; and novelist E.L. Doctorow called it a mordant parable ... his masterpiece.[citation needed]
The historian Dale L. Walker[60] commented
Jack London was an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.
Critics have said his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes
The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device ... Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn ... is a synoptic series of short episodes.
Ambrose Bierce said of The Sea-Wolf that the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen ... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime. However, he noted, The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.
The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel that anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here.
Apocrypha
Jack London Credo
London's literary executor, Irving Shepard, quoted a Jack London Credo in an introduction to a 1956 collection of London stories
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
The biographer Stasz notes that the passage has many marks of London's style but the only line that could be safely attributed to London was the first.The words Shepard quoted were from a story in the San Francisco Bulletin, December 2, 1916 by journalist Ernest J. Hopkins, who visited the ranch just weeks before London's death. Stasz notes Even more so than today journalists' quotes were unreliable or even sheer inventions and says no direct source in London's writings has been found. However, at least one line, according to Stasz, is authentic, being referenced by London, and written in his own hand, in the autograph book of Australian suffragette Vida Goldstein
Dear Miss Goldstein--
Seven years ago I wrote you that I'd rather be ashes than dust. I still subscribe to that sentiment.
Sincerely yours,
Jack London
Jan. 13, 1909
Furthermore, in his short story By The Turtles of Tasman, a character, defending her ne'er-do-well grasshopperish father to her antlike uncle, says ... my father has been a king. He has lived .... Have you lived merely to live Are you afraid to die I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet. When you are dust, my father will be ashes.
London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.
Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist claiming to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.
Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe that London's father was astrologer William Chaney.Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown. Most San Francisco civil records were destroyed by the extensive fires that followed the 1906 earthquake; nobody knows what name appeared on his birth certificate. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to London's mother Flora Wellman as having been his wife and also cites an advertisement in which Flora called herself Florence Wellman Chaney.
According to Flora Wellman's account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. When she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. After she gave birth, Flora turned the baby over to ex-slave Virginia Prentiss, who remained a major maternal figure throughout London's life. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby John, later known as Jack, to live with the newly married couple. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London completed grade school.
In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney responded that he could not be London's father because he was impotent; he casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted on an abortion. He concluded that he was more to be pitied than London.London was devastated by his father's letter. In the months following, he quit school at Berkeley and went to the Klondike.
Early life
London at the age of nine with his dog Rollo, 1885
London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. The house burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the California Historical Society placed a plaque at the site in 1953. Although the family was working class, it was not as impoverished as London's later accounts claimed. London was essentially self-educated.
In 1885, London found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa. He credited this as the seed of his literary success.In 1886, he went to the Oakland Public Library and found a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who encouraged his learning. (She later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community).
In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his black foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate. In his memoir, John Barleycorn, he claims to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie.After a few months, his sloop became damaged beyond repair. London became hired as a member of the California Fish Patrol.
In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophie 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 grueling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly's Army and began his career as a tramp. In 1894, he spent 30 days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo. In The Road, he wrote
Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say 'unprintable'; and in justice I must also say undescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them.
After many experiences as a hobo and a sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School. He contributed a number of articles to the high school's magazine, The Aegis. His first published work was Typhoon off the Coast of Japan, an account of his sailing experiences.
Jack London studying at Heinold's First and Last Chance in 1886
As a schoolboy, London often studied at Heinold's First and Last Chance, a port-side bar in Oakland. At 17, he confessed to the bar's owner, John Heinold, his desire to attend University and pursue a career as a writer. Heinold lent London tuition money to attend college.
London desperately wanted to attend the University of California, Berkeley. In 1896, after a summer of intense studying to pass certification exams, he was admitted. Financial circumstances forced him to leave in 1897 and he never graduated. No evidence suggests that London wrote for student publications while studying at Berkeley.
Heinold's First and Last Chance, Jack London's Rendezvous
While at Berkeley, London continued to study and spend time at Heinold's saloon where he was introduced to the sailors and adventurers who would influence his writing. In his autobiographical novel, John Barleycorn, London mentioned the pub's likeness seventeen times. Heinold's was the place where London met Alexander McLean, a captain known for his cruelty at sea,[16] on whom the protagonist in London's novel The Sea-Wolf, Wolf Larsen, is based.
Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon is now unofficially named Jack London's Rendezvous in his honor.
Gold rush and first success
Miners and prospectors ascend the Chilkoot Trail during the Klondike Gold Rush
On July 12, 1897, London (age 21) and his sister's husband Captain Shepard sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush. This was the setting for some of his first successful stories. London's time in the Klondike, however, was detrimental to his health. Like so many other men who were malnourished in the goldfields, London developed scurvy. His gums became swollen, leading to the loss of his four front teeth. A constant gnawing pain affected his hip and leg muscles, and his face was stricken with marks that always reminded him of the struggles he faced in the Klondike. Father William Judge, The Saint of Dawson, had a facility in Dawson that provided shelter, food and any available medicine to London and others. His struggles there inspired London's short story, To Build a Fire, which many critics assess as his best.
His landlords in Dawson were mining engineers Marshall Latham Bond and Louis Whitford Bond, educated at Yale and Stanford. The brothers' father, Judge Hiram Bond, was a wealthy mining investor. The Bonds, especially Hiram, were active Republicans. Marshall Bond's diary mentions friendly sparring with London on political issues as a camp pastime.
London left Oakland with a social conscience and socialist leanings; he returned to become an activist for socialism. He concluded that his only hope of escaping the work trap was to get an education and sell his brains. He saw his 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 California in 1898, London began working deliberately to get published, a struggle described in his novel, Martin Eden. His first published story was To the Man On Trail, which has frequently been collected in anthologies. When The Overland Monthly offered him only five dollars for it—and was slow paying—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.
London began his writing career 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. In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, about $69,000 in today's currency. Among the works he sold to magazines was a short story known as either Bâtard or Diable, in two editions of the same basic story. A cruel French Canadian brutalizes his dog. The dog retaliates and kills the man. London told some of his critics that man's actions are the main cause of the behavior of their animals, and he would show this in another short story which was to be The Call of the Wild.
George Sterling, Mary Austin, Jack London, and Jimmie Hooper on the beach at Carmel, California
In early 1903, London sold The Call of the Wild to The Saturday Evening Post for $750, and the book rights to Macmillan for $2,000. Macmillan's promotional campaign propelled it to swift success.
While living at his rented villa on Lake Merritt in Oakland, London met poet George Sterling and in time they became best friends. In 1902, Sterling helped London find a home closer to his own in nearby Piedmont. In his letters London addressed Sterling as Greek, owing to his aquiline nose and classical profile, and signed them as Wolf. London was later to depict Sterling as Russ Brissenden in his autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1910) and as Mark Hall in The Valley of the Moon (1913).
In later life London indulged his wide-ranging interests by accumulating a personal library of 15,000 volumes. He referred to his books as the tools of my trade.
First marriage (1900–1904)
Jack with daughters Becky (left) and Joan (right)
Bessie Maddern London and daughters, Joan and Becky
London married Elizabeth Bessie Maddern on April 7, 1900, the same day The Son of the Wolf was edited. Bess had been part of his circle of friends for a number of years. She was related to stage actresses Minnie Maddern Fiske and Emily Stevens. Stasz says, Both acknowledged publicly that they were not marrying out of love, but from friendship and a belief that they would produce sturdy children.,Kingman says, they were comfortable together... Jack had made it clear to Bessie that he did not love her, but that he liked her enough to make a successful marriage.During the marriage, London continued his friendship with Anna Strunsky, co-authoring The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary novel contrasting two philosophies of love. Anna, writing Dane Kempton's letters, arguing for a romantic view of marriage, while London, writing Herbert Wace's letters, argued for a scientific view, based on Darwinism and eugenics. In the novel, his fictional character contrasted two women he had known.
London's pet name for Bess was Mother-Girl and Bess's for London was Daddy-Boy.Their first child, Joan, was born on January 15, 1901, and their second, Bessie (later called Becky), on October 20, 1902. Both children were born in Piedmont, California. Here London wrote one of his most celebrated works, The Call of the Wild.
While London had pride in his children, the marriage was under strain. Kingman says that by 1903, they were close to separation as they were extremely incompatible. Nevertheless, Jack was still so kind and gentle with Bessie that when Cloudsley Johns was a house guest in February 1903 he didn't suspect a breakup of their marriage.
London reportedly complained to friends Joseph Noel and George Sterling
[Bessie] is devoted to purity. When I tell her morality is only evidence of low blood pressure, she hates me. She'd sell me and the children out for her damned purity. It's terrible. Every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won't let me be in the same room with her if she can help it.
Stasz writes that these were code words for [Bess's] fear that [Jack] was consorting with prostitutes and might bring home venereal disease.On July 24, 1903, London told Bessie he was leaving and moved out. During 1904, London and Bess negotiated the terms of a divorce, and the decree was granted on November 11, 1904.
Bohemian Club
London (right) at the Bohemian Grove with his friends Porter Garnett and George Sterling; a painting parodies his story The White Silence
On August 18, 1904, London went with his close friend, the poet George Sterling, to Summer High Jinks at the Bohemian Grove. London was elected to honorary membership in the Bohemian Club and took part in many activities. Other noted members of the Bohemian Club during this time included Ambrose Bierce, Allan Dunn, John Muir, Gelett Burgess, and Frank Norris.
Beginning in December 1914, London worked on The Acorn Planter, A California Forest Play, to be performed as one of the annual Grove Plays, but it was never selected—it was described as too difficult to set to music.London published The Acorn Planter in 1916.
Second marriage
Jack and Charmian London (ca. 1915) at Waikiki
After divorcing Maddern, London married Charmian Kittredge in 1905. London was introduced to Kittredge by his MacMillan publisher, George Platt Brett, Sr., while Kittredge served as Brett's secretary. Biographer Russ Kingman called Charmian Jack's soul-mate, always at his side, and a perfect match. Their time together included numerous trips, including a 1907 cruise on the yacht Snark to Hawaii and Australia.Many of London's stories are based on his visits to Hawaii, the last one for 10 months beginning in December 1915.The couple also visited Goldfield, Nevada, in 1907, where they were guests of the Bond brothers, London's Dawson City landlords. The Bond brothers were working in Nevada as mining engineers.
London had contrasted the concepts of the Mother Woman and the Mate Woman in The Kempton-Wace Letters. His pet name for Bess had been mother-girl; his pet name for Charmian was mate-woman.[31] Charmian's aunt and foster mother, a disciple of Victoria Woodhull, had raised her without prudishness.Every biographer alludes to Charmian's uninhibited sexuality.
The Snark in Australia, 1921
Joseph Noel calls the events from 1903 to 1905 a domestic drama that would have intrigued the pen of an Ibsen.... London's had comedy relief in it and a sort of easy-going romance.In broad outline, London was restless in his marriage; sought extramarital sexual affairs; and found, in Charmian Kittredge, not only a sexually active and adventurous partner, but his future life-companion. They attempted to have children. One child died at birth, and another pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.
In 1906, London published in Collier's magazine his eye-witness report of the San Francisco earthquake.
Beauty Ranch (1905–1916)
The old Winery Cottage, where London died (in the left sleeping porch) on November 22, 1916
In 1905, London purchased a 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California, on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain, for $26,450. 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 for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. 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.
London in 1914
Stasz writes that London had taken fully to heart the vision, expressed in his agrarian fiction, of the land as the closest earthly version of Eden ... he educated himself through the study of agricultural manuals and scientific tomes. He conceived of a system of ranching that today would be praised for its ecological wisdom.[citation needed] He was proud to own the first concrete silo in California, a circular piggery that he designed. He hoped to adapt the wisdom of Asian sustainable agriculture to the United States. He hired both Italian and Chinese stonemasons, whose distinctly different styles are obvious.
The ranch was an economic failure. Sympathetic observers such as Stasz treat his projects as potentially feasible, and ascribe their failure to bad luck or to being ahead of their time. Unsympathetic historians such as Kevin Starr suggest that he was a bad manager, distracted by other concerns and impaired by his alcoholism. Starr notes that London was absent from his ranch about six months a year between 1910 and 1916, and says, He liked the show of managerial power, but not grinding attention to detail .... London's workers laughed at his efforts to play big-time rancher [and considered] the operation a rich man's hobby.
London spent $80,000 ($2,040,000 in current value) to build a 15,000-square-foot (1,400 m2) stone mansion (Wolf House) on the property. Just as the mansion was nearing completion, two weeks before the Londons planned to move in, it was destroyed by fire.
London's last visit to Hawaii,[36] beginning in December 1915, lasted eight months. He met with Duke Kahanamoku, Prince Jonah Kalaniana'ole, Queen Lili‘uokalani and many others, before returning to his ranch in July 1916.He was suffering from kidney failure, but he continued to work.
The ranch (abutting stone remnants of Wolf House) is now a National Historic Landmark and is protected in Jack London State Historic Park.
Death
Grave of Jack and Charmian London
Many older sources describe London's death as a suicide, and some still do.This conjecture appears to be a rumor, or speculation based on incidents in his fiction writings. His death certificate[38] gives the cause as uremia, following acute renal colic, a type of pain often described as the worst pain...ever experienced,commonly caused by kidney stones. Uremia is also known as uremic poisoning.
London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. He was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed to his death. The biographer Stasz writes, 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.
London's fiction featured several suicides. In his autobiographical memoir John Barleycorn, he claims, as a youth, to have drunkenly stumbled overboard into the San Francisco Bay, some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. He said he drifted and nearly succeeded in drowning before sobering up and being rescued by fishermen. In the dénouement of The Little Lady of the Big House, the heroine, confronted by the pain of a mortal gunshot wound, undergoes a physician-assisted suicide by morphine. Also, in Martin Eden, the principal protagonist, who shares certain characteristics with London himself, drowns himself.
London had been a robust man but had suffered several serious illnesses, including scurvy in the Klondike. At the time of his death, he suffered from dysentery and uremia and late stage alcoholism. During travels on the Snark, he and Charmian may have picked up unspecified tropical infections. Most biographers, including Russ Kingman, now agree he died of uremia aggravated by an accidental morphine overdose.
London's ashes were buried, together with those of his second wife Charmian (who died in 1955), in Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California. The simple grave is marked by only a mossy boulder.
Accusations of plagiarism
Jack London in his office
London was vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism not only because he was such a conspicuous, prolific, and successful writer, but also because of his methods of working. He wrote in a letter to Elwyn Hoffman, expression, you see—with me—is far easier than invention. He purchased plots and novels from the young Sinclair Lewis and used incidents from newspaper clippings as writing material.
Egerton R. Young claimed The Call of the Wild was taken from his book My Dogs in the Northland. London acknowledged using it as a source and claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking him.
In July 1901, two pieces of fiction appeared within the same month London's Moon-Face, in the San Francisco Argonaut, and Frank Norris's The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock, in Century. Newspapers showed the similarities between the stories, which London said were quite different in manner of treatment, [but] patently the same in foundation and motive.London explained both writers based their stories on the same newspaper account. A year later, it was discovered that Charles Forrest McLean had published a fictional story also based on the same incident.
In 1906, the New York World published deadly parallel columns showing eighteen passages from London's short story Love of Life side by side with similar passages from a nonfiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald, titled Lost in the Land of the Midnight Sun.London noted the World did not accuse him of plagiarism, but only of identity of time and situation, to which he defiantly pled guilty.
The most serious charge of plagiarism was based on London's The Bishop's Vision, Chapter 7 of his The Iron Heel. The chapter is nearly identical to an ironic essay that Frank Harris published in 1901, titled The Bishop of London and Public Morality.[45] Harris was incensed and suggested he should receive 160th of the royalties from The Iron Heel, the disputed material constituting about that fraction of the whole novel. London insisted he had clipped a reprint of the article, which had appeared in an American newspaper, and believed it to be a genuine speech delivered by the Bishop of London.
Views
Socialism
London wrote from a socialist viewpoint, which is evident in his novel The Iron Heel. Neither a theorist nor an intellectual socialist, London's socialism grew out of his life experience. As London explained in his essay, How I Became a Socialist,his views were influenced by his experience with people at the bottom of the social pit. His optimism and individualism faded, and he vowed never to do more hard physical work than necessary. He wrote that his individualism was hammered out of him, and he was politically reborn. He often closed his letters Yours for the Revolution.London joined the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. In the same year, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story about the twenty-year-old London giving nightly speeches in Oakland's City Hall Park, an activity he was arrested for a year later. In 1901, he left the Socialist Labor Party and joined the new Socialist Party of America. He ran unsuccessfully as the high-profile Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland in 1901 (receiving 245 votes) and 1905 (improving to 981 votes), toured the country lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published two collections of essays about socialism The War of the Classes (1905) and Revolution, and other Essays (1906).
Stasz notes that London regarded the Wobblies as a welcome addition to the Socialist cause, although he never joined them in going so far as to recommend sabotage.Stasz mentions a personal meeting between London and Big Bill Haywood in 1912.[49]
In his late (1913) book The Cruise of the Snark, London writes, about appeals to him for membership of the Snark's crew from office workers and other toilers who longed for escape from the cities, and of being cheated by workmen.
In his Glen Ellen ranch years, London felt some ambivalence toward socialism and complained about the inefficient Italian labourers in his employ.In 1916, he resigned from the Glen Ellen chapter of the Socialist Party, but stated emphatically he did so because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle. In an unflattering portrait of London's ranch days, California cultural historian Kevin Starr refers to this period as post-socialist and says ... by 1911 ... London was more bored by the class struggle than he cared to admit. Starr maintains London's socialism
always had a streak of elitism in it, and a good deal of pose. He liked to play working class intellectual when it suited his purpose. Invited to a prominent Piedmont house, he featured a flannel shirt, but, as someone there remarked, London's badge of solidarity with the working class looked as if it had been specially laundered for the occasion. [Mark Twain said] It would serve this man London right to have the working class get control of things. He would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties.
Racial views
London shared common Californian concerns about Asian immigration and the yellow peril, which he used as the title of a 1904 essay.This theme was also the subject of a story he wrote in 1910 called The Unparalleled Invasion. Presented as a historical essay narrating events between 1976 and 1987, the story describes a China with an ever-increasing population taking over and colonizing its neighbors, with the intention of taking over the entire Earth. The western nations respond with biological warfare and bombard China with dozens of the most infectious diseases.
Many of London's short stories are notable for their empathetic portrayal of Mexican (The Mexican), Asian (The Chinago), and Hawaiian (Koolau the Leper) characters. London's war correspondence from the Russo-Japanese War, as well as his unfinished novel Cherry, show he admired much about Japanese customs and capabilities,which has lead to big popularity of London (considered a Japanophile) among the Japanese, who consider themselve rather positively portrayed by him.
In London's 1902 novel Daughter of the Snows, the character Frona Welse has a speech about Teutonic virtues in contrast to the characteristics of other races. The scholar Andrew Furer, in a long essay exploring the complexity of London's views, says there is no doubt that Frona Welse is acting as a mouthpiece for London in this passage.
London's 1904 essay, The Yellow Peril,criticizes Asians. He admits, it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.
In Koolau the Leper, London describes Koolau, who is a Hawaiian leper—and thus a very different sort of superman than Martin Eden—and who fights off an entire cavalry troop to elude capture, as indomitable spiritually—a ... magnificent rebel. This character is based on Hawaiian leper Kaluaikoolau who revolted and resisted capture from forces of the Provisional Government of Hawaii in the Kalalau Valley in 1893.
Jeffries (left) vs. Johnson, 1910
An amateur boxer and avid boxing fan, London reported on the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight, in which the black boxer Jack Johnson vanquished Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope. In 1908, according to Furer, London praised Johnson highly, contrasting the black boxer's coolness and intellectual style, with the apelike appearance and fighting style of his white opponent, Tommy Burns what on Saturday was bigness, coolness, quickness, cleverness, and vast physical superiority... Because a white man wishes a white man to win, this should not prevent him from giving absolute credit to the best man, even when that best man was black. All hail to Johnson. Johnson was superb. He was impregnable as inaccessible as Mont Blanc.Those who defend London against charges of racism cite the letter he wrote to the Japanese-American Commercial Weekly in 1913
In reply to yours of August 16, 1913. First of all, I should say by stopping the stupid newspaper from always fomenting race prejudice. This of course, being impossible, I would say, next, by educating the people of Japan so that they will be too intelligently tolerant to respond to any call to race prejudice. And, finally, by realizing, in industry and government, of socialism—which last word is merely a word that stands for the actual application of in the affairs of men of the theory of the Brotherhood of Man.
In the meantime the nations and races are only unruly boys who have not yet grown to the stature of men. So we must expect them to do unruly and boisterous things at times. And, just as boys grow up, so the races of mankind will grow up and laugh when they look back upon their childish quarrels.
In Yukon in 1996, after the City of Whitehorse renamed two streets to honor London and Robert W. Service, protests over London's allaged racism forced the city to change the name of Jack London Boulevard back to Two-mile Hill.
Works
Short stories
Western writer and historian Dale L. Walker writes.
London's true métier was the short story ... London's true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed. His stories that run longer than the magic 7,500 generally—but certainly not always—could have benefited from self-editing.
London's strength of utterance is at its height in his stories, and they are painstakingly well-constructed.[citation needed] To Build a Fire is the best known of all his stories. Set in the harsh Klondike, it recounts the haphazard trek of a new arrival who has ignored an old-timer's warning about the risks of traveling alone. Falling through the ice into a creek in seventy-five-below weather, the unnamed man is keenly aware that survival depends on his untested skills at quickly building a fire to dry his clothes and warm his extremities. After publishing a tame version of this story—with a sunny outcome—in The Youth's Companion in 1902, London offered a second, more severe take on the man's predicament in The Century Magazine in 1908. Reading both provides an illustration of London's growth and maturation as a writer. As Labor (1994) observes To compare the two versions is itself an instructive lesson in what distinguished a great work of literary art from a good children's story.
Other stories from the Klondike period include All Gold Canyon, about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; The Law of Life, about an aging American Indian man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; Love of Life, about a trek by a prospector across the Canadian tundra; To the Man on Trail, which tells the story of a prospector fleeing the Mounted Police in a sled race, and raises the question of the contrast between written law and morality; and An Odyssey of the North, which raises questions of conditional morality, and paints a sympathetic portrait of a man of mixed White and Aleut ancestry.
London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer. A Piece of Steak is a tale about a match between older and younger boxers. It contrasts the differing experiences of youth and age but also raises the social question of the treatment of aging workers. 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 revolution.
Numerous stories of London would today be classified as science fiction. The Unparalleled Invasion describes germ warfare against China; Goliah revolves around an irresistible energy weapon; The Shadow and the Flash is a tale about two brothers who take 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 is a late story from a period when London was intrigued by the theories of the psychiatrist and writer Jung. It tells of an island tribe held in thrall by an extraterrestrial object. His dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, meets the contemporary definition of soft science fiction.
Some nineteen original collections of short stories were published during London's brief life or shortly after his death. There have been numerous posthumous anthologies drawn from this pool of nineteen books. Many of these collections have been themed around the locales of the Klondike and the Pacific. A collection of Jack London's San Francisco Stories was published in October 2010 by Sydney Samizdat Press.[61]
Novels
London writing, 1905
London's most famous novels are The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden.
In a letter dated Dec 27, 1901, London's Macmillan publisher George Platt Brett, Sr. said he believed Jack's fiction represented 'the very best kind of work' done in America.
Critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild a beautiful prose poem; editor Franklin Walker said that it belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn; and novelist E.L. Doctorow called it a mordant parable ... his masterpiece.[citation needed]
The historian Dale L. Walker[60] commented
Jack London was an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.
Critics have said his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes
The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device ... Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn ... is a synoptic series of short episodes.
Ambrose Bierce said of The Sea-Wolf that the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen ... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime. However, he noted, The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.
The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel that anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here.
Apocrypha
Jack London Credo
London's literary executor, Irving Shepard, quoted a Jack London Credo in an introduction to a 1956 collection of London stories
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
The biographer Stasz notes that the passage has many marks of London's style but the only line that could be safely attributed to London was the first.The words Shepard quoted were from a story in the San Francisco Bulletin, December 2, 1916 by journalist Ernest J. Hopkins, who visited the ranch just weeks before London's death. Stasz notes Even more so than today journalists' quotes were unreliable or even sheer inventions and says no direct source in London's writings has been found. However, at least one line, according to Stasz, is authentic, being referenced by London, and written in his own hand, in the autograph book of Australian suffragette Vida Goldstein
Dear Miss Goldstein--
Seven years ago I wrote you that I'd rather be ashes than dust. I still subscribe to that sentiment.
Sincerely yours,
Jack London
Jan. 13, 1909
Furthermore, in his short story By The Turtles of Tasman, a character, defending her ne'er-do-well grasshopperish father to her antlike uncle, says ... my father has been a king. He has lived .... Have you lived merely to live Are you afraid to die I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet. When you are dust, my father will be ashes.
