Jack London: A Life
Jack London, born January 12th, 1876, and raised in Oakland, California by an unloving mother and his stepfather, John London, survived a very disorganized childhood. His stepfather's failing health made it necessary for Jack to act as the family breadwinner soon after he finished the 8th grade.
Besides working in an Oakland fish cannery, he also became an "oyster pirate" in the San Francisco Bay. Later, Jack worked on a "seal-hunter" ship in the Pacific, joined an Alaskan gold rush, and finally enlisted in Kelly's Army, a group of working men who tried to box-car their way to Washington D.C. and petition Congress for money and jobs. But Jack's first attempt to support this socialist movement earned him a month of hard labor in a New York jail.
But all of this became a learning experience in Jack London's life as well as subject matter for the stories he would soon write. He also read avidly and tried to develop a writing style similar to Rudyard Kipling's. Kershaw mentions that Jack, "...personified the writer as a man of action, who truly lived out what he wrote."
However, Jack's personal problems also affected his career as a writer. He was an alcoholic and a womanizer, and though he had two daughters by his first marriage, they were concealed from Jack by their mother. Then when his novels began to sell, he got deeply in debt.
What finally made Jack appear as more of a capitalist than a working-class socialist was his development of Beauty Ranch at Glen Ellen, California. At the same time, the Snark, a lavish yacht, was being built, and construction of the famed Wolf House on the Sonoma Mountain was underway. However, it burned down just before Jack and his second wife, Charmian, moved in.
Jack made it a habit to write 1000 words each day, and in 16 years he wrote 40 books. His most popular novel, Call of the Wild, has been printed in 80 different languages. Several of his stories were also made into movies in the early 1900s.
Jack London was only 40 years old when he died in 1916 from a poison (uraemia) he'd contracted years before while in the South Pacific.
Alex Kershaw's biography of Jack London's life is interesting reading and presents two sections of photographs. But the work becomes heavy with quotations from London's own writing, as well as synopses of many of his novels. The book, Jack London: A Life, was published in 1997.