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2.5 Jack London (1876-1916). Jack London was raised in Oakland, across San Francisco Bay. He is accordingly a California writer, like Frank Norris before him. He enjoyed a colorful childhood, most of it in the margins of Victorian respectability. His life story is indeed almost as eventful as his novels. His biographical experiences sometimes served as source material for his fictions.
London was raised in a family environment bathing in the world of late-19th-century pseudo-science and fairground attractions. His mother Flora Wellman was a music teacher and astrologer claiming she had shamanistic capabilities. His biological father, William Shaney, was an astrologer as well. Flora and William’s marital status remains unclear: the records of their possible marriage were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco fires following the Great Earthquake. William had tried to convince Flora to terminate her pregnancy. He later denied fatherhood, claiming he was impotent. Their son, initially called John, was at first raised by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss. Flora eventually married Civil-War veteran John London. Her son was henceforth known as “Jack.”
Jack came from a working-class family, but his parents were not as poor as he later claimed. He attended grade school in Oakland, yet was mostly self-taught. He became an avid reader of books at the public library. Like H. G. Wells, one of his literary idols, he expected to rise socially by acquiring knowledge.
At fourteen, he started work in a cannery. He found a way out of this hard work by taking to the sea: He bought a boat on borrowed money and became an oyster pirate. Ironically, he later joined the California Fish Patrol, chasing other oyster pirates. At seventeen, in 1893, he joined a seal schooner, the Sophia Sutherland, and went to Japan.
On his return from Japan, Jack found the US in deep economic crisis and labor unrest: this was the 1893 depression. After taking on tough factory jobs, he joined a march of unemployed workers, “Kelly’s Army,” the western contingent of the larger “Coxey’s Army” marching on Washington DC. In the mid-1890s, he lived as a tramp. He was jailed several times for vagrancy. These experiences are recorded in his autobiographical narrative The Road.
London joined the Oakland High School in 1895 and studied to be admitted to the University of Berkeley. His first texts were written for the High-School magazine. He stayed at Berkeley one year, yet never graduated.
In July 1897, London contacted his biological father, who disowned him altogether. After this painful confrontation, London left for the Klondike, a sub-Arctic Canadian region in the grips of a gold rush (this episode is usually called the Klondike Gold Rush). The experience was decisive for London’s future literary output: the Klondike setting appears in his most successful stories, the stories of the Great North. Yet London, like most aspiring gold diggers, was extremely malnourished due to the harsh sub-Arctic conditions. He fell ill with scurvy, and was rescued by Father William Judge (the “Saint of Dawson”), who enabled him to survive.
In the Klondike, London discussed politics with Republican mining engineers. He came back from the gold rush with his initial socialist credo spectacularly strengthened. He had first joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1896, then the broader-based Socialist Party of America. In his later career, he gave numerous lectures on socialism, and published collections of essays on the topic.
His socialist commitment notwithstanding, London decided to learn to make money as a professional writer in order to escape drudgery of working-class labor. His writing apprenticeship is described in his partly autobiographical novel Martin Eden. By 1900, he made a comfortable living writing stories for popular magazines. In 1903, he completed The Call of the Wild, which became hugely successful, though he earned only a fraction of the profits.
Alongside his literary publications, he also wrote essays of investigative journalism, and was therefore a fellow traveler of the muckraking movement. In 1903, he published The People of the Abyss, the record of his exploration of the London East End slums. The text testifies to his deep sympathy for the underclass, as well as to his insightful understanding of capitalistic inequalities. In 1905, he covered the Russian-Japanese war as a journalist. In 1906, he published an account of the big San Francisco earthquake.
London had married Bessie Madden in 1900. They had two daughters, Joan and Bessie. By 1904 this first marriage led to divorce. London became a member of the Bohemian club, where he met writers Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris. In 1905, he married Charmian Kittredge, who worked for his publisher, and had been his mistress for a couple of years. He traveled widely with Charmian, notably to Honolulu, on their yacht, the Snark.
In 1905, he bought a ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California. His later fiction, after 1910, was published mostly to pay for the ranch. His attempts to make the ranch a model farm are alluded to in The Valley of the Moon (1913). Economically, the ranch was a failure. London’s early death in 1916 was often regarded as a suicide, but was probably due to disease, coming after a whole series of health problems including alcoholism.
London was unapologetic about the fact that he was a commercial writer, trying to make a comfortable living by publishing in popular magazines. He was accused of plagiarism several times, perhaps legitimately. His most famous novels and stories are his narratives of the North Country, based on his experiences in the Klondike. Yet he was also the author of Marxism inspired social novels, of psychological fiction expressing his belief in evolution and in a Nietzschean concept of masculinity, of sf stories, and of journalistic and political essays.
Novels: A Daughter of the Snows (1902) The Call of the Wild (1903) The Sea-Wolf (1904) White Fang (1906) Martin Eden (1909) The Iron Heel (1908) The Valley of the Moon (1913)
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