Jack London, the oyster pirate who wrote the wild into American fiction

Jack London

Photo: Arnold Genthe / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 12, 1876 San Francisco, California, United States
Died	November 22, 1916 (40)
Occupation	Novelist

This January, Jack London State Historic Park, on Sonoma Mountain in California, let visitors in for free to mark a century and a half since the birth of the man buried there under a mossy boulder. The anniversary has filled the park’s year, from a Call of the Wild festival in May to a talk in November about his unpublished photographs of Molokai. The question behind it all: how did a cannery boy from Oakland, dead at forty, become one of the first American writers to turn fiction into worldwide fame and a fortune?

He came into the world as John Griffith Chaney, in San Francisco. The astrologer William Chaney, whom biographers believe was his father, refused to acknowledge him, and within the year his mother, Flora Wellman, married John London, a partly disabled Civil War veteran, and the boy took his name. The person who gave him the most affection was Virginia Prentiss, a formerly enslaved neighbour who had nursed him as a baby. At the Oakland Public Library, Ina Coolbrith, later California’s first poet laureate, fed him books.

Born on 12 January 1876, he was working 12 to 18 hours a day in a cannery by the age of 13. He bought a sloop, the Razzle-Dazzle, and raided oyster beds in San Francisco Bay, then joined the Fish Patrol that chased the raiders. In 1893 he shipped out on a sealing schooner bound for Japan. A year later he joined a march of the unemployed on Washington and spent 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary in Buffalo for vagrancy. He later used that year on the rails for The Road (1907), a book of hoboes, freight trains and prison. He got into Berkeley in 1896 and left a year later for lack of money.

Recommended ReadingMark Twain, the writer who told America a truth it has spent a century arguing about

In July 1897 he sailed north for the Klondike Gold Rush. He came back with no gold, scurvy and four fewer front teeth, but with the material for everything that made his name. When The Black Cat magazine paid him 40 dollars for a story, he said that he had been saved “literally and literarily”. His first story collection, The Son of the Wolf, came out on 7 April 1900, the day he married Bessie Maddern. To Build a Fire showed how fast he was learning. The 1902 version for young readers has a happy ending. In the 1908 rewrite for The Century Magazine, a man alone at seventy-five below zero must light a fire to stay alive, and that is the version found in anthologies everywhere.

The breakthrough came in 1903 with The Call of the Wild. It follows Buck, a big ranch dog stolen from California and sold into the brutal sled-dog trade of the Yukon, who sheds his training layer by layer until he answers to the wolves. The Saturday Evening Post paid 750 dollars for the serial; Macmillan made the book a best seller. E. L. Doctorow later called it “a mordant parable … his masterpiece”. That same year London published The People of the Abyss, the result of a summer living among the poor of London’s East End, reported undercover.

The Sea-Wolf (1904) gave him his greatest character, Wolf Larsen, a sealing captain who reads philosophy and rules his ship by force. London based him on a real captain he had heard about at Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland. Ambrose Bierce said that creating Larsen was “enough for a man to do in one lifetime”. White Fang (1906) reversed the journey of Buck: a wolf-dog born in the wild is slowly brought into a human home in California. Between books he covered the Russo-Japanese War for the San Francisco Examiner, married Charmian Kittredge in 1905, bought the ranch at Glen Ellen and in 1907 sailed for the South Pacific on his own boat, the Snark.

The novels that followed took him a long way from the dog stories. The Iron Heel (1908) imagines an American oligarchy crushing a workers’ revolt and is often read as a forerunner of George Orwell’s dystopias. Martin Eden (1909), about a sailor who teaches himself to write, wins success and finds it empty, is the closest London came to a self-portrait. The Scarlet Plague (1912) is set in 2073, sixty years after a pandemic has emptied the world, and found a new readership through several reissues in 2020. The Valley of the Moon (1913) sends a working couple from Oakland back to the land, and The Star Rover (1915) follows a San Quentin prisoner in a straitjacket who escapes into his past lives.

He also has to be read whole. London wrote openly racist essays about Asian immigration and a 1910 story imagining germ warfare against China, and he urged a white boxer to take the heavyweight title from Jack Johnson. When the city of Whitehorse, in the Yukon, named a street after him in 1996, protests forced it to change the name back. A chapter of The Iron Heel also turned out to be almost identical to an essay by Frank Harris. Orwell, who admired him, saw in his love of strength and the primitive “a Fascist strain”.

Wolf House, the stone mansion he built on the ranch, burned down in 1913 just before the Londons moved in. That same year he published John Barleycorn, a frank memoir of his drinking. He died on the ranch on 22 November 1916, aged 40. His death certificate gives uremia; most biographers now reject the old story of suicide and point to kidney failure made worse by an accidental morphine overdose.

A century later his books keep finding new forms. Pietro Marcello moved Martin Eden to Naples in 2019, and Luca Marinelli won the Volpi Cup at Venice for the title role. Chris Sanders made The Call of the Wild with Harrison Ford in 2020. He was among the most widely read foreign authors in the Soviet Union, and a lake in Magadan bears his name. A line credited to him, “I would rather be ashes than dust”, turned up in a James Bond film in 2021. This November marks 110 years since his death.

Tags: novelists, George Orwell, Jack London, Martin Eden, The Call of the Wild, The Iron Heel

More Like This

J. K. Rowling, who wrote the story of a generation and then became the story herself

Philip K. Dick, the writer who turned paranoia into prophecy

Herman Melville, the customs inspector who had already written the great American novel

Edgar Allan Poe, the writer who invented detective fiction and left his own death unsolved

Tom Clancy, the insurance man who gave American power its voice

Aldous Huxley, the man who named our cage and spent the rest of his life looking for the exit