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Jack London
(1876-1916)
 London,
Jack (John Griffith London), 1876–1916, American
author, b. San Francisco. The illegitimate son of an astrologer
and a Welsh farm girl, he had a poverty-stricken childhood,
brought up by his mother and her husband, John London. At 17,
Jack London shipped as an able seaman to Japan and the Bering
Sea. He was an oyster pirate, a gold-seeker in the first
Klondike rush, a newspaper correspondent during the
Russo-Japanese War, and in 1914 a war correspondent in Mexico.
His stories, romantic adventures with realistic setting and
character, began to appear first in the Overland Monthly.
In 1900, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North was
published. London's Klondike tales are exciting, vigorous, and
brutal. The Call of the Wild (1903), about a tame dog who
eventually leads a wolf pack, is one of the best animal stories
ever written. Among his other works are The Sea-Wolf
(1904), White Fang (1905), and Smoke Bellew
(1912). Martin Eden (1909) and Burning Daylight
(1910) are partly autobiographical. Although he was a highly
paid writer of extremely popular fiction, London, a socialist,
considered his social tracts—The People of the Abyss
(1903) and The Iron Heel (1907)—as his most important
work. The Cruise of the Snark (1911) is a vivid account
of his interrupted voyage around the world in a 50-ft (15.2-m)
ketch-rigged yacht, and John Barleycorn; or, Alcoholic
Memoirs (1913) is autobiographical. Beset in his later years
by alcoholism and financial difficulties, London died at the age
of 40.
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