Jack London’s name is synonymous with tales of adventure. His hugely popular novels and short stories were informed by his extensive travels, his struggles as a young man, and his outrage at social injustice....
Born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco in January 1876, London took the name of his stepfather, whom his mother married later that year. After spending much of his childhood in the care of his African American foster-mother, Virginia Prentiss, he went to work for a cannery at 13, before becoming a sailor and labouring in a power plant and a jute mill.
In 1894 he was arrested for vagrancy and spent 30 days in jail in Buffalo. Convinced that education was his surest route out of poverty, he enrolled at high school in Oakland, continuing his studies in public libraries, where he read Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche. At a sailors’ pub, Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, he met many of the characters that would appear in novels such as The Sea-Wolf (1904). The pub’s owner, John Heinold, lent London the money to attend the University of California, but he dropped out after a year, unable to afford the fees.
He sailed to Yukon in northern Canada in 1897 to join the Klondike Gold Rush; while he didn’t make his fortune there, the appalling conditions provided material for the stories he began publishing in magazines on his return the following year. They also fuelled his staunch socialism, and the passionate hatred of cruelty to animals that found expression in The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906).
His magazine stories were collected in his first book, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900), and established his career as a writer. There was no looking back: he would publish some 50 works of fiction and non-fiction in his short life, including the semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) about a young working-class man trying to become a writer, and John Barleycorn (1913) which drew on his struggle with alcoholism. In Burning Daylight (1910), the bestselling novel of his lifetime, he returned to his experiences in the Yukon once again.
Jack London died on his ranch in California in 1916, his health undermined by alcohol, opium and the scurvy he contracted in the Klondike. His socialism had earned him lasting fame in Soviet Russia, while the young George Orwell grew up reading him: The People of the Abyss (1903), a factual account of life among the poor of London’s East End, inspired Down and Out in Paris and London, while The Iron Heel (1908), a dystopian fantasy about a right-wing coup in the United States, left its mark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
