Jack London

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by J. Allen Barksdale

In his writing as in his highly publicized personal life, Jack London provided an overture for the complexities of American society in the early years of the twentieth century. Despite a professional career of less than 20 years, London wrote over 50 novels, 200 short stories, and an additional 400 pieces of non-fictional prose. His various adventures as a South Seas sailor, Socialist politician, Alaskan argonaut, Asian war correspondent, California farmer, and general hobo at large, exemplified the wanderlust which characterized both America's roots and its future. Although London's persona invites a comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy of the strenuous life or Frederick Jackson Turner's vision of frontier regeneration, he reveled in ambiguities beyond the scope of his contemporaries.

London was born in San Francisco, the illegitimate child of Flora Wellman. Before his first birthday, his mother had married John London, a widower with two daughters. The resulting family was plagued by hardship; the specter of poverty would prove to be the strongest feature of London's childhood. The family frequently moved throughout the Bay area, and Jack entered the working world at age nine. Such a life fostered self-reliance and independence, virtues that later became prominent themes in London's writing. Denied a formal education, the boy compensated through voracious reading. He became a fixture at the public libraries, absorbing the advice of Horatio Alger and the adventures of great explorers.

By age 15, London had entered the world of the outlaw, staking out an existence by thieving oysters from the commercial beds around San Francisco Bay. His nautical career assumed legitimacy in 1893 when he joined the crew of a sealing vessel working in the north Pacific. Following a seven-month sea voyage, he returned to Oakland, but quickly embarked on a cross-country odyssey, initially as a member of Joseph Coxney's "Army" of unemployed men who were traveling to Washington in a quest for government assistance in the wake of the Panic of 1893. By the time this group reached Missouri, London was ready to travel alone and panhandled his way to Niagara, New York. These wanderings climaxed with his arrest for vagrancy in June 1894. After serving a 30-day sentence, he returned to California.

Such youthful experiences became the inspiration for literature. Several of London's short stories dealt with the world of the oyster pirates, and his tenure on the high seas later provided the foundation for The Sea Wolf (1904). The autobiographical work The Road (1907) recounts his trek across America. Literary scholars generally perceive these adventures as critical in London's emergence as a writer. Close contact with an assortment of sailors and vagabonds instructed the youth in the art of storytelling. Furthermore, these escapades--particularly the humiliation of incarceration--ignited London's sense of social justice and ultimately shaped his political beliefs.

By 1895, London was attending Oakland High School and augmenting his class work with impassioned readings of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer. He had previously dabbled in writing, and an account of his sealing experiences, "Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan," was published in the San Francisco Morning Call in November of 1893. During his year in high school, London spent more time on this craft, contributing an assortment of writings to the student literary magazine. Despite the haphazard nature of his formal education, he successfully completed the entrance examination for the University of California at Berkeley, but his college experience proved short lived; at the close of the first semester, he had to leave the university for financial reasons.

London responded to this setback by giving priority to his writing. Aflame with the ideals of Socialism (he became an active member of the Socialist Labor Party in 1896), he embarked on a frenzy of composition, experimenting in everything from political tracts to poetry, and bombarding San Francisco publishers with the results. Despite his enthusiasm, his efforts were rewarded with little beyond rejection forms, and the aspiring writer eventually became a laundry worker at a private academy for boys. The semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) discusses his difficulties during this time but, although this was a particularly discouraging point in his development, his fortunes soon changed.

In the summer of 1897, London became one of the thousands of hopeful migrants to the gold fields of the Klondike. As a prospector, however, he enjoyed a distinct absence of luck. For much of his mining career, he was constrained by brutal weather or debilitating illness, but these setbacks did not prevent him from realizing the epic and allegorical potential of the world around him. By the summer of 1898, he had returned to San Francisco, financially none the richer for his experience, but reeling with ideas. By April 1900, his first novel The Son of the Wolf had appeared to a welcoming public. For the next decade, London transformed his Yukon adventures into an assortment of successful short stories and novels that have proved to be his most enduring work, particularly the novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906).