Jack London born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco, California was an American novelist, journalist best known for the novels “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild”. He was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing.
Jack London was the son of Flora Wellman and William Chaney. His name was John Griffith Chaney, even though his parents weren’t married and his father was never part of his life. He was sent for wet-nursing to a neighbor who was an formerly enslaved African American Woman named Jennie Prentiss after his mother tried to kill herself because his father demanded that she had an abortion. In 1876 his mother married john London who was a civil war veteran and he took his father in law name. The family moved several time and the Prentiss family moved with them and continued to take care of the young Jack.
He built his own life as a teen, and at the age 14 he quit school and began working. He rode trains, pirated oysters with the sloop bought with borrowed money from his foster mother Virginia Prentiss, then worked for the government fish patrol, shoveled coal, worked on ships. All this while he went to the library as often as possible to read novels and travel books.
After his many experiences as a hobo and sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended the Oakland High School. He often studied at the Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon and the owner John Heinold allowed him to go to the University of California by lending him the tuition money.
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Due to financial problem he never finished the University and in 1897 he sailed with his sister’s husband to join the Klondike gold rush. There he was so malnourished that he developed scurvy but it was also the setting for some of his first successful stories.
In 1898 after returning to California he began working to get published. He was closed to giving up when his story “A Thousand Deaths” was accepted by the Black Cat. It was during that period that new printing technologies began to enable lower-cost production of magazines resulting in a boom in popular magazines and opening the way for short fiction publication aimed at a wide public audience.
In 1900, he began making good money selling his stories and married Elizabeth Mae Maddern, the day of the publication of his novel “The Son of the Wolf” on April 7, 1900. Both of them acknowledged that they were not marrying out of love, but from friendship and a belief that they would produce sturdy children. They had 2 children, both born in Piedmont, California where he wrote one of his most famous work; “The Call of the Wild”. Joan his first child was born on January 15, 1901 and Bessie was born on October 20, 1902. Sadly they divorced on November 11, 1904.
The success of this book didn’t stop London’s hard writing habits and he published more than 50 books over the last 16 years of his life. His most famous novels are: “The Call of the Wild”, “White Fang”, “The Sea-Wolf”, “The Iron Heel”, and “Martin Eden” but there are many others. From 1902 to 1916 he wrote one to two novels a year but also short stories, autobiographical memoirs, non-fiction and essays, plays, and poetry,
From January 25 to June 1904 he covered the Russo-Japanese War and was arrested 4 times by the Japanese authority during his short period of work as a war correspondent. Then in 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge with who he went in numerous trips to Hawai, Australia, Nevada ….
For much of the last decade of his life, London had some health problem including a kidney disease which ended up taking his life on November 22, 1916
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| Avant Adam Croc-Blanc L’appel de la forêt | The Call of the Wild Martin Eden part 1 Martin Eden part 2 The Sea-Wolf White Fang |
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Interesting article. I read several of his books when I was a kid.
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I did too. Because of some of his stories I use to want to go live in Canada when I was a teenager…
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