Jack London
(1876–1916)

Jack London's wildly popular fiction made him the highest-paid writer of his time, just after the dawn of the twentieth century. His books continue to be read by legions of devoted fans. What explains the enduring appeal of London's works to generations of readers? Perhaps one critic of the day grasped the secret of London's success: in his novels and short stories, wrote Granville Hicks, London had discovered "a dreamland of heroic opportunity."

One of the author's biographers, Alex Kershaw, has written that "more than any other American writer, Jack London had an insatiable appetite for life." London was born in San Francisco, California, in 1876. After completing grammar school at age fourteen, he worked in a cannery and on the docks as a longshoreman. Together with some friends, he bought a boat and risked arrest by raiding oyster beds in San Francisco Bay. Signing up as a sailor at the age of seventeen, he joined a seal-hunting cruise to Japan; he recalls some of his experiences on this journey in the memoir entitled "That Dead Men Rise Up Never." Returning home, he took a tramping trip through the United States and Canada, completed his high school courses in one year, and studied for one semester at the University of California. Finally, at the age of twenty-one, London embarked on an adventure that would change his life: he joined the gold rush to the Klondike.

The Klondike region lies in the Yukon Territory of northwest Canada near the Alaskan border. Rich gold deposits were discovered there in 1896, triggering a rush of thousands of prospectors to the almost uninhabited region. Like most of these fortune hunters, London found no gold. However, in the far north he discovered something even more valuable: the inspiration for some of his best fiction. For London, the forbidding landscape and unforgiving climate of the Klondike posed a stark challenge to human strength and survival. The conflicts of man vs. nature and civilization vs. barbarity were to become some of the writer's main themes.

Soon after his return from the Klondike, London began to write about his experiences. His stories appeared in two popular magazines, the Overland Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly. London's reputation gathered steam rapidly. Within three years, he had published two collections of stories, a lengthy report on slum conditions in England, and the novel that gained him international fame, The Call of the Wild. The story of the kidnapped pet dog Buck—half St. Bernard, half shepherd—and his transformation into a wild dog in the Yukon was written in a little over three months. Upon publication, it was instantly hailed as a classic. In the course of nearly a century, it has become one of the most widely-read American novels.

A prolific writer, London soon capitalized on his success with a series of novels and stories: The Sea-Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906), and Love of Life and Other Stories (1907). He took a journalism assignment to report on the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. He made lecture tours, sailed in the Pacific, and bought an estate in California. London's interest in philosophy and sociology, dating back to his university days, inspired him to write a number of essays on class struggle and primitive violence. In 1909, he published a semi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden, about the struggles of a young writer.

With rare exceptions such as the story "To Build a Fire," however, London's work toward the end of his career failed to recapture the brilliance of his early stories and novels. In the final years of his brief life, poor management caused him financial problems and the excesses of hard living broke his health. London died at his ranch in California, only fourtyyears old.

Jack London's fiction reveals many of the features of Naturalism, a literary movement among novelists at the end of the 19h century. Naturalism had its origins in the theory and practice of the French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902), who believed that fiction should depict human society with scientific precision and unflinching accuracy. Naturalist writers tended to view human beings as the helpless victims of either heredity or environment. In the face of such supremely strong forces, human beings had to develop brute strength in order to survive. Other early exponents of Naturalism in American literature included Stephen Crane, author of the classic Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage; Frank Norris, whose characters struggled with economic oppression; and Theodore Dreiser, who portrayed characters trapped or crushed by social forces beyond their control. Although it is difficult to generalize about such a complex movement, the following short poem by Jack London's contemporary Stephen Crane suggests some of the bleakness of Naturalism's vision of the power of the individual:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

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