Jack London

Jack London: Forty Years at Full Throttle

He staked a claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek and found, by his own account, very little gold. He wintered in a ten-by-twelve log cabin on the Stewart River where meat stayed frozen on a shelf eight feet from a red-hot stove. By May 1898 scurvy had, in his journal's phrase, "almost entirely crippled me from the waist down," and it took his four front teeth. He then rowed 1,500 miles to the Bering Sea to get home. Jack London's verdict on the worst year of his life was unambiguous: "It was in the Klondike that I found myself."

Born to Nobody in Particular

He was born John Griffith Chaney on 12 January 1876 near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. His mother, Flora Wellman, was a music teacher and spiritualist; his biological father was said to be the astrologer William Chaney, who denied it. Late that year Flora married John London, a Civil War veteran, and the boy took his name. The person who actually raised him in infancy was Virginia Prentiss, a formerly enslaved neighbour who nursed him and remained his most reliable maternal figure.

He was illegitimate, poor, and — as America was constituted in 1876 — nobody's investment.

Cannery, Pirate, Tramp

His working life began at Hickmott's Cannery in 1889, twelve to eighteen hours a day. He got out by buying a boat and turning oyster pirate aboard the *Razzle-Dazzle*, then flipped sides and joined the California Fish Patrol. In 1893 he shipped out on the sealing schooner *Sophie Sutherland*. He tramped across the country with Coxey's Army and in 1894 served thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary in Buffalo for vagrancy.

His education ran alongside all of this and was mostly self-administered. From 1886 he haunted the Oakland Public Library, where the librarian Ina Coolbrith took an interest and pointed him at books. He got through Oakland High School and, after a period of ferocious cramming, into the University of California, Berkeley, in 1896. Money ran out in 1897 and he left without a degree. In April 1896 he had joined the Socialist Labor Party.

The Chilkoot

On 12 July 1897 he left for the Klondike. The journey went by sea to Alaska, up a fjord to Dyea, and over the Chilkoot Trail, where prospectors were required to haul roughly a ton of supplies up a steep, muddy slope in relay. London watched men collapse; at least seventy died in avalanches and landslides. He built a spruce boat, ran the rapids at Box Canyon and White Horse — competently enough that other parties noticed — and travelled five hundred miles down the Yukon before the freeze. That December he snowshoed eighty miles in temperatures near seventy below.

He also met a 140-pound Saint Bernard–collie cross named Jack, owned by Marshall Bond, who observed that London "recognized his noble qualities, but took them as a matter of course." That dog became Buck.

A Thousand Words a Day

The first money he ever received for a story was $40, from *The Black Cat* for "A Thousand Deaths" in 1899. *The Son of the Wolf* appeared on 7 April 1900 — the same day he married Elizabeth "Bessie" Maddern, with whom he had two daughters, Joan and Becky, before leaving in July 1903. Then came the industrialised phase: roughly a thousand words every day, without a break. *The Call of the Wild* (1903) was sold to the *Saturday Evening Post* for $750 and pushed hard by Macmillan into instant fame. *The People of the Abyss* (1903) reported the London slums. *The Sea-Wolf* (1904), *White Fang* (1906), *The Iron Heel* (1908), *Martin Eden* (1909) and *John Barleycorn* (1913) followed, plus more than nineteen story collections. By 1900 he was earning $2,500 a year — roughly $97,000 today — which for a boy out of a cannery was a different order of existence.

He married Charmian Kittredge in 1905, whom the biographer Russ Kingman called "Jack's soul-mate, always at his side, and a perfect match." In 1907 they set off on the *Snark* for Hawaii and Australia.

Politics and the Ranch

He joined the Socialist Party of America in 1901, ran for mayor of Oakland twice (245 votes in 1901, 981 in 1905), lectured nationally on socialism in 1906, and published *War of the Classes* and *Revolution, and other Essays*. He also cooled: by 1916 he had resigned from the Glen Ellen chapter.

Glen Ellen was the other obsession. He bought a thousand acres in Sonoma County in 1905 and wrote that "next to my wife, the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me." He built Wolf House, a 15,000-square-foot stone mansion that cost $80,000, and it burned down two weeks before they were due to move in. The ranch never paid. He was away from it half of every year between 1910 and 1916.

He died on 22 November 1916, in a sleeping porch on that ranch, aged forty. The death certificate said uremia following acute renal colic. Because he was taking morphine and opium — then routine over-the-counter medicines — older accounts insisted on suicide; most modern biographers, Kingman included, settle on uremia aggravated by an accidental morphine overdose. The biographer Clarice Stasz notes that a "biographical myth developed in which he has been portrayed as an alcoholic womanizer who committed suicide," and that firsthand documents do not support the caricature.

Why Jack Is Called a Genius

The gift was compression under physical duress — the ability to put a reader inside a body that is failing in the cold, and to make the failure a moral event rather than a description. Dale L. Walker's judgement is the standard one: London's "true métier was the short story" and his "true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under." "To Build a Fire" is the demonstration. Maxwell Geismar called *The Call of the Wild* "a beautiful prose poem," and Ambrose Bierce, not a generous man, called Wolf Larsen a "tremendous creation." London was also one of the first American writers to become an international celebrity and get rich doing it, and he remained among the most translated American authors of the twentieth century.

The counter-case is substantial. Walker, who praised the stories, also wrote that the novels are "hugely flawed," often reading as linked short stories rather than sustained structures. London faced repeated plagiarism accusations, and one is hard to explain away: chapter seven of *The Iron Heel* is close to identical to Frank Harris's 1901 essay, though London maintained he had believed it a genuine speech. Worse are the racial politics. He wrote the 1904 essay "The Yellow Peril" and the 1910 story "The Unparalleled Invasion," and endorsed eugenics outright — "I believe the future belongs to eugenics" — even if he never called for forced sterilisation. Set against stories like "The Mexican," "The Chinago" and "Koolau the Leper," which extend real sympathy to their non-white protagonists, the record is contradictory rather than exculpatory. George Orwell named the problem precisely, identifying a "Fascist strain" in London's temperament: his "love of violence and physical strength, his belief in 'natural aristocracy', his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive." The same appetite that makes the Northland stories unforgettable is the appetite Orwell distrusted.

Legacy

His ashes lie under a rock near the ruins of Wolf House, with Charmian's since 1955; the ranch is now Jack London State Historic Park. There is a Mount London on the Alaska–British Columbia boundary, a Jack London Square on the Oakland waterfront, a Jack London Lake in Russia's Magadan Oblast, and a 1986 U.S. postage stamp. He was forty when he died and had lived what most writers would need two lifetimes to fake.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Call of the Wild
• Notable work: The People of the Abyss
• Notable work: The Sea-Wolf
• Notable work: White Fang
• Genres: naturalism and adventure fiction