Jack London

John Griffith London, known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist, and activist born on January 12, 1876, and died on November 22, 1916. He helped pioneer commercial fiction and American magazines, becoming one of the first U.S. authors to achieve international fame and make a large fortune from writing. In San Francisco, he belonged to a radical literary circle called "The Crowd" and strongly supported animal welfare, workers' rights, and socialism. His works on these subjects include the dystopian novel The Iron Heel, the nonfiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and War of the Classes; he also wrote Before Adam, a prehistoric fantasy novel.

His best-known books are The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, along with short stories like "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," and "Love of Life." He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen."

Family

London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. His mother, Flora Wellman, was the youngest of five children of Marshall Wellman, a Pennsylvania Canal builder, and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was a descendant of Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. After her mother died and her father remarried, Flora left Massillon, Ohio, and moved to the Pacific coast, working in San Francisco as a music teacher and spiritualist.

Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe London's father was astrologer William Chaney. Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether they were legally married is unknown. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney referred to Flora as "his wife," and an advertisement listed her as "Florence Wellman Chaney." According to Flora's account in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded she have an abortion.

When she refused, he denied responsibility. In desperation, she shot herself, suffering only a minor wound but becoming temporarily deranged. After giving birth, she sent the baby to be wet-nursed by Virginia (Jennie) Prentiss, a neighbor and former slave. Prentiss became an important maternal figure throughout London's life, and he later called her his primary source of love and affection as a child.

Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby John—later called Jack—to live with them. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London finished public grade school. The Prentiss family moved with them and remained a stable source of care for young Jack.

In 1897, at age 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London searched for and read newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney replied that he could not be London's father because he was impotent, casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men, and claimed she had slandered him by saying he insisted on an abortion. Devastated by the letter, London quit Berkeley within months and went to the Klondike during the gold rush boom.

Early life

Though his family was working class, it was not as impoverished as London later claimed. He was largely self-educated. In 1885, he read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa, which he credited as the seed of his literary success. The next year, he found a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith, at the Oakland Public Library; she encouraged his learning and later became California's first poet laureate.

In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. In his memoir John Barleycorn, he claims also to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie.

After a few months, his sloop was damaged beyond repair, and he joined the California Fish Patrol. In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for Japan. When he returned, the panic of 1893 had hit, and Oakland was swept by labor unrest. After grueling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Coxey's Army and began life as a tramp.

In 1894, he spent 30 days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary in Buffalo, New York, an experience he wrote about in The Road. After many experiences as a hobo and sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School, contributing articles to the school magazine The Aegis. His first published work was "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan," an account of his sailing experiences.

As a schoolboy, he often studied at Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon, a port-side bar in Oakland. At 17, he told the bar's owner, John Heinold, about his desire to attend university and become a writer; Heinold lent him tuition money. London desperately wanted to attend the University of California in Berkeley. In 1896, after a summer of intense studying, he passed the entrance exams.