SOURCE CITATION
"John Griffith London." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
"The greatest story Jack London ever wrote," Alfred Kazin observed in On Native Ground, "was the story he lived." London's life has at times seemed to fascinate readers more than his art. His life was a rags-to-riches story, but with an ironic ending that makes it a cautionary lesson in the price exacted for pursuing fame and success. While London's life is often used to explain his work, since the 1950s critics have allowed that his works contain a greater depth than was originally realized. The novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, among others, are now considered classics of American literature. While they may be considered dog stories, these books explore elemental questions about man's relationship to himself, to others, and to the natural world. London is equally well known for his short stories, which compress emotion and action into vivid stories of life spent in the arctic wilderness or at sea.

The facts of London's life are, without question, fascinating. Born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876, the son of an itinerant astrologer father, William Henry Chaney, and a seance-conducting, spiritualist mother, Flora Wellman, London grew up believing that he was the child of John London, the man whom Flora subsequently married and who gave the child his name. When London, at twenty, discovered the truth and wrote to Chaney, William Chaney denied his paternity and refused to meet his son. London's insecurity over his parentage, Irving Stone claimed in Sailor on Horseback, was "to torment and torture him to the end of his days."

London grew up in and around Oakland, California, in a family that was both poor and rootless: in one year they moved six times. John London was a decent but hapless man, unable to succeed in any line of work; Flora London, whose own family in Ohio had been wealthy and socially prominent, was pretentious, prejudiced, ambitious, and not very affectionate toward her son, according to many scholars. A black woman, Virginia Prentiss, became the boy's nurse and surrogate mother. Except for her attentions, London's childhood was one of loneliness, insecurity, and deprivation--or so he remembered it in later life. In reality the Londons were never terribly poor. But the writer's memory and not the reality is what matters most for understanding the psychological wounds he suffered as a child. He was starved, as Carolyn Johnston reported in Jack London--An American Rebel?, not for goods, but for attention and affection. Like many other sensitive and intelligent children who feel lonely and unloved, London found refuge in books and became a voracious reader, but he was hardly the typical bookworm. In his youth, London "held a variety of low-paying blue-collar jobs: working as a common laborer in a jute mill, on an ice wagon, in a bowling alley, and in an electric railway power plant," wrote Robert M. Hogge in Dictionary of Literary Biography. "These jobs taught him quickly the vices of American capitalism, to him a demeaning caste system in which the well-paid owners and managers (bourgeoisie) held the low-paid workers (proletariat) in economic slavery."

As a teen, London was introduced to the sea after spending $2 for a broken down, leaky sailing dinghy. "Although it had no centerboard, the dinghy provided adventure that helped launch the seagoing and writing career of a man who would become the best-known, best-selling, highest-paid author of his day," wrote Joe Brown in Cruising World. At sixteen, London, a haunter of the Oakland Public Library, borrowed enough money to buy a $300 fishing sloop and began a career as an oyster pirate, complete with a mistress who came with the boat. Oyster pirating was an exciting, dangerous way for a boy to make a living, and London was so good at it that he gained the title of "Prince of the Oyster Pirates." However, a brush with the law convinced him to change sides and pursue his former confederates as an agent of the shore police. These adventures later served as the material for one of his most popular juvenile works, Tales of the Fish Patrol.

Tiring of this line of work, London signed aboard a sealing schooner in 1893 and spent seven months sailing the North Pacific. There he acquired both the nickname, "Sailor Jack," that he used proudly in his hobo days and the knowledge of the brutality of seafaring that provided the background for one of his most famous novels, The Sea-Wolf. The condition of his family necessitated, upon his return to San Francisco, that London find steady work, which he did, first in a salmon cannery and then in a power station, where he shoveled coal for ten hours a day. He found this employment as a physical laborer brutal and mentally debilitating, but he was determined to persevere until he could rise to the position of electrician. However, when he discovered that because of his youthful strength and ambition he had been assigned the quota of two men, he quit his job and, at eighteen, joined the western contingent of Coxey's Army, a ragtag band of unemployed workingmen, for its bonus march on Washington, D.C. Even this wayward life proved too restrictive, and at Hannibal, Missouri, London deserted to ride the rails as a hobo and sometimes chicken thief. His adventures as a hobo are recounted with great verve and freshness in The Road, perhaps the most immediately engaging of all London's works, termed "a brilliant little book" by George Orwell in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell.

The buoyant sense of freedom and irresponsibility that London enjoyed while tramping collapsed in Niagara Falls, New York, where he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to a month in the Erie County Penitentiary. This experience, London claimed in his autobiographical essay "How I Became a Socialist," proved a turning point in his life and converted him to socialism. Before, he had been "an individualist without knowing it," confident that his superior physical ability would allow him to make his way in the world. But on the road and in prison he encountered men who had once had as much physical ability as he but who nevertheless had sunk to the bottom of what he called the Social Pit. While in prison he promised himself that he would succeed in life not by his brawn as a workman, but by his brain as a writer. "I ran back to California," he concluded, "and opened the books."

Convinced now of the need for formal education, London entered Oakland High School to prepare himself for college exams, cramming with the same energy that he had used shoveling coal. He also published his first stories in the school's literary magazine The Aegis. In addition, he joined the Socialist Labor party and threw himself into its activities, gaining a degree of notoriety as a street-corner orator, "the boy socialist of Oakland," as the newspapers styled him. He was arrested for violating a city ordinance against public street meetings, and his subsequent acquittal proved to be a successful challenge to the power structure, making him a hero to local radicals.

Compressing years of study into a few months, London passed his college exams and entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1896. The experience proved disillusioning, however, and he remained there for only one semester. He began submitting his work, everything from light verse to sociological essays, to magazines, but with no success. "In an intense apprenticeship, London spent from fifteen to nineteen hours each day developing and refining his craft and gaining insights into philosophy, economics, and political theory in what he called 'a frantic pursuit of knowledge,'" Hogge said. "He wrote at least a thousand words each day throughout his career (and often more than that during his apprenticeship), exploring almost every possible writing genre." His motive for writing was simple, as he explained in a letter to his friend Cloudesley Johns: "I am writing for money; if I can produce fame that means more money. . . . I shall always hate the task of getting money; everytime I sit down to write it is with great disgust." Since no one was buying what London wanted to sell, he was forced to violate his oath never to do manual labor again and took a job in a laundry, working six days a week for very long hours. This depressing period in his life is vividly recreated in the early chapters of his semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden.

London's financial ambitions now took a new, and ultimately lucky, turn. He decided to join the Yukon gold rush, and in July of 1897 he embarked for Alaska. He remained in the Klondike for almost a year and struck no gold, but he did discover a rich vein of narrative material that he would mine lucratively in his soon-to-come leap to fame. Many of the ideas that later informed his writing also began to crystallize for London during this period. While in the Klondike, he explored the works of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Milton, and Herman Melville and read many of the materialistic philosophers. He showed little interest in the genteel literature of the day, preferring philosophy, ecomomics, anthropology, and political theory. Ironically, a good case could be made that London, the hard-living adventurer, was the most rigorously intellectual of all American writers.

The environment of the Klondike--sketched chillingly in the opening pages of White Fang as brutal, relentless, destructive of everything soft or gentle--was for London the laboratory in which to test imaginatively his ideas about life. Here both nature and man appeared at their most elemental level, stripped of comforting illusions. On his return to Oakland in 1898, he thus had the subject matter for the works that would establish his fame. For two years he struggled in extreme poverty, working furiously day and night, to make his way as a writer. At first he accumulated only a drawer full of rejection notices, but slowly he began to sell his stories. Then, in 1900, the prestigious Boston publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin published London's first collection of Alaskan tales, The Son of the Wolf. The writing in the best of London's early stories was, according to Maxwell Geismar in Rebels and Ancestors, "completely fresh in its time, offering a contrast to the sweetness and goodness of popular fiction of the 1900's. The cadence of this prose only became completely familiar to us, indeed, in the postwar generation of the 1920s." It was a prose lean, spare, and sinewy, suited to the often grim subject matter of the North. Perhaps surprisingly for that period, both style and subject proved popular.

Following The Son of the Wolf, London quickly published two other volumes of stories, The God of His Fathers and Children of the Frost, as well as his first novel, A Daughter of the Snows, which even its author deemed to be a failure. Then, in 1903, he produced his acknowledged masterpiece, The Call of the Wild. This novella was originally meant to be the opposite of "Batard," a love story between man and dog that he had written earlier, but it grew into something much greater than that. The Call of the Wild recounts the reversion of a civilized dog, Buck, to his primitive heritage. Kidnapped from a sunny California ranch, Buck, through a series of owners and adventures, moves ever farther North, ever closer to the sources of his true nature. In one owner, John Thornton, Buck finds the perfect master and serves him as the perfect sled dog: in this union London convincingly portrays the love between man and animal that was the novella's inspiration. But Thornton falls victim to the savage environment of the North, and Buck is free to fulfill his final destiny as the immortal Ghost Dog of Northland legend, incarnating, as Labor expressed it, "the eternal mystery and creation of life." Joan London reports that her father considered his masterpiece "a purely fortuitous piece of work, a lucky shot in the dark that had unexpectedly found its mark"; when reviewers hailed it as a brilliant allegory, London pleaded "guilty": "But I was unconscious of it at the time. I did not mean to do it." Perhaps because what Geismar termed a "beautiful prose poem of the buried impulses" was so much the product of London's unconscious mind, it achieves a mythic resonance seldom found in his later works.

The Call of the Wild brought London worldwide fame, and he determined to follow its success with a companion book, but one that would "reverse the process. Instead of devolution or decivilization of a dog," he wrote to his publisher, "I'm going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog--the development of domesticity, faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities and virtues." This book, White Fang, appeared in 1906 and, indeed, inverted the pattern of The Call of the Wild, moving its wolf dog protagonist from savagery to civilization, from brutal struggle for mere survival in the frozen wastes to a comfortable old age of dozing in the California sun. Though considered a lesser artistic achievement than its companion piece, it is no less serious a work. Here London presented his philosophy that the environment determines man's actions, demonstrating "the awful plasticity of life,. . . the marvelous power and influence of environment." As a fable celebrating the civilizing process, it has found less favor with critics, who seem to prefer adventure to security, danger to domestication. Why, asked Poet James Dickey in his introduction to a 1981 edition of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories, is White Fang inferior to its predecessor? "Largely, I think," Dickey continued, "because the events depicted in The Call of the Wild are closer to what one wants to see happen: because we desire the basic, the 'natural', the 'what is' to win (over) the world of streetcars and sentimentalism that we have made."

Throughout most of London's serious work, he explores the tension established in his two dog fables, the tension between the powerful individual forging his own destiny and the civilizing influences of society, which will ultimately replace competition with cooperation (and capitalism with socialism). The Sea-Wolf clearly demonstrates this tension. Intending his negative portrayal of the title character, Wolf Larsen, as an attack on the superman philosophy, London instead created what critics such as Earle Labor and, writing in The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal, Charles N. Watson, Jr., have identified as one of the major creations of American literature, similar to, if not quite the equal of, the character Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick.

Martin Eden again explores London's contradictory impulses. Clearly an autobiographical character, Eden represents London's conception of what he would have become without his socialism: a self-styled superman who perished because of his separation, as London put it, from the People. However, Eden's conversion to socialism is poorly wrought, and the books socialist characters are not a particularly compelling group. Some have also noted that London's personal hunger for success and his resolution to do only "brain work" seemed at odds with the tenets of socialism. Regardless of these tensions, London remained a socialist for over twenty years, and its themes reappeared throughout his works.

In the half dozen years between The Call of the Wild and Martin Eden, London published most of his other major works: The People of the Abyss, a masterful piece of sociological reportage on life in the East End slums of London; War of the Classes, his most important collection of essays on social issues; The Game, a boxing tale which was among the earliest examples of sports fiction in American literature; The Road, an often amusing account of young London's days as a hobo; Before Adam, an "anthropological romance" of prehistoric times; and The Iron Heel, a futuristic vision of the development of capitalism into fascism, widely praised as a classic of socialist literature. White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and several collections of short stories, which included such memorable works as "To Build a Fire" and "The Love of Life," were also the products of these few years. This was, without doubt, London's peak creative period.

As America's most famous and best-selling author--the first, in fact, ever to become a millionaire by his pen--London had transformed himself into a public personality, like Mark Twain before him and Ernest Hemingway, for example, or Norman Mailer after. His lavish standard of living, complete with an oriental valet; his drinking binges and occasional barroom brawls--all were subject matter for the popular press, which found that London's exploits made good copy. As much as he resented the often hostile attention of the press, London nevertheless increasingly offered up his own accounts of his private life for public consumption. In 1913 he published John Barleycorn, aptly subtitled an "Alcoholic Memoir." A candidly autobiographical account of his battle with alcohol, the book's fault, London claimed, was "that I did not dare put in the whole truth." Even earlier, in 1911, London treated his readers to a minutely detailed account of his disastrous attempt to sail his ill-fated yacht, the Snark, around the world. Built at enormous expense, the Snark was meant to give him back the freedom of his youth; instead, it gave him only headaches and heartache. Although the voyage was a complete fiasco, The Cruise of the Snark is an engagingly self-indulgent, even lighthearted account of his nautical trials and tribulations. In his book Jack London, Charles C. Walcutt noted that London spoke directly and immediately to his readers, assuming "that the smallest detail of his life will be of interest" to them. Fame had made his private life an exploitable commodity.

Fame also had a unhealthy effect on London's art, which declined after about 1909. In the wake of the Snark fiasco London undertook an even more grandiose plan: the development of his 260-acre Beauty Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, with its baronial mansion, Wolf House, designed to "stand for a thousand years." Though his income was great by the standards of the day, his expenses were greater, and London's oft-repeated claim that he wrote only for money became ever truer. To pay for his ambitious agricultural ventures, Andrew Sinclair reported in Jack: A Biography of Jack London, London mortgaged his future as an author, "condemning himself to write the commercial at the expense of the good." He even resorted to buying story plots from struggling young writers like Sinclair Lewis and to imitating his own earlier successes. Thus, while the bulk of London's works appeared in the second half of his career, when he was averaging more than two books a year, none of them ever reached the level of his best early work. The Scarlet Plague, an end-of-civilization catastrophe tale and London's most accomplished venture into science fiction, is an exception, and the so-called Sonoma novels--Burning Daylight, The Valley of the Moon, and The Little Lady of the Big House--are at least serious in intent, if not very successful in execution. Their theme of salvation through a return to the land was an obvious projection of London's own hopes of the fulfillment that his experiments at Beauty Ranch would bring, but even these hopes proved futile. Wolf House burned in 1913 just as it was completed, and it was uninsured. The last of London's dreams seemed to die with it.

As the quality of London's work declined after 1909, so did the quality of his life, which was increasingly marked by personal tragedy and physical pain. In 1910 his and Charmian's daughter, Joy, died only a few days after her birth. Then in 1912 Charmian suffered a miscarriage, and London became convinced that they would never have the son that he wanted so desperately. His attempt at a reconciliation with his daughter Joan proved an embittering failure. Physically, the body in whose strength and vigor London had always taken such pride started to fail him as well: his kidneys were seriously deteriorating by 1914, and he began to suffer from acute rheumatism as well as an assortment of other ills.

London spent much of the period from 1915 to 1916 in Hawaii, seeking to recuperate from his increasingly severe illnesses. Even then he continued to write prolifically. Most of this work was not very good, but during this time London did produced one of his best stories, "The Red One." A hauntingly evocative fantasy of an indecipherable message sent to Earth from space, it was not highly regarded at the time, but it is now accepted as one of the classics of science fiction and among the most powerful of London's fictions. In 1915, London published The Star Rover, which Hogge called "his last great work." The book "is a science-fiction novel concerning the out-of-body experiences of an intelligent man and convicted murderer, Professor Darrell Standing, from his straightjacket in San Quentin." Standing possesses the power to project his spirit outside of his body. He experiences and analyzes his past incarnations, "a process that enables him to cope with his inhumane treatment in prison and allows London to write his redemptive 'Christ novel,'" Hogge remarked.

In July, 1916, London returned to his ranch in California, in deteriorating health. He had become dependent on a variety of pain-killing drugs, and on November 22, 1916, while suffering an agonizing intestinal attack, he took a fatal overdose of morphine. On the death certificate London's family doctor gave the cause as an acute attack of a "gastro-intestinal type of uremia"--no mention of the drug overdose. Whether his death actually was an accident or a suicide is an issue of much controversy among critics, dividing them about equally. However, ultimately London has been remembered not for his death but for his life. In a mere forty years, London became the author of more than fifty books, the first American author to earn $1 million from his writing, and one of America's most famous writers.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, CA; died of an overdose of morphine, November 22, 1916, in Glen Ellen (some sources say Santa Rosa), CA; buried in Jack London State Park, Valley of the Moon, Sonoma County, CA; son of William Henry (an itinerant astrologer) Chaney (some sources list paternity as questionable) and Flora (a spiritualist and music teacher) Wellman; adopted surname of stepfather, John London, c. 1876; married Bessie Mae Maddern (a tutor), April 7, 1900 (divorced, 1905); married Clara Charmian Kittredge, November 19, 1905; children: (first marriage) Joan, Bess; (second marriage) Joy (died, 1910). Education: Attended University of California, Berkeley, c. 1897-98.

CAREER
Novelist, short story writer, and political essayist. Worked at a succession of odd jobs, including salmon canner, oyster pirate, patrol agent of San Francisco shore police, seal fisher, jute millworker, coal shoveler, and laundry worker, beginning c. 1890; joined Coxey's Army (a band of jobless men who marched to Washington, DC), and tramped throughout the United States and Canada, beginning in 1893; arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to one month in Erie County Penitentiary in New York, c. 1895; gold miner in the Yukon Territory, 1897-98; worked as a journalist and reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst Newspapers, 1904; ran for mayor of Oakland, CA, on the Socialist ticket, 1905; lecturer throughout the United States, 1905-06; reported on the Mexican Revolution for Collier's, 1914.