Description

Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, (born January 12, 1876, San Francisco, California,

U.S.-died November 22, 1916, Glen Ellen, California), American novelist and short-story

writer whose best-known works-among them The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906)-depict elemental

struggles for survival. During the 20th century he was one of the most extensively translated of American authors.

Deserted by his father, a roving astrologer, he was raised in Oakland, California, by his spiritualist mother and his stepfather,

whose surname, London, he took. At age 14 he quit school to escape poverty and gain adventure.

He explored San Francisco Bay in his sloop, alternately stealing oysters or working for the government fish patrol.

He went to Japan as a sailor and saw much of the United States as a hobo riding freight trains and as a member of Charles T.

Kelly's industrial army (one of the many protest armies of the unemployed, like Coxey's Army,

that was born of the financial panic of 1893). London saw depression conditions, was jailed for vagrancy,

and in 1894 became a militant socialist.

London educated himself at public libraries with the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx,

and Friedrich Nietzsche, usually in popularized forms. At 19 he crammed a four-year high school

course into one year and entered the University of California, Berkeley, but after a year he quit school

to seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush. Returning the next year, still poor and unable to find work,

he decided to earn a living as a writer.