November 22, 2016

Today, November 22, marks 100 years since the death of American author, journalist, and political activist Jack London in 1916. London, the most widely read American author of his time, gained fame for his adventure stories, many of which dealt with nature and the wilderness of western North America—both on land and at sea. Much of London’s fiction can be read as juvenile stories, but his best work also dealt with complex adult themes.

Jack London. Credit: Library of Congress

John Griffith London was born on Jan. 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California, and raised mostly in nearby Oakland. His childhood was marked by emotional and economic deprivation. Between the ages of 16 and 19, he held many jobs connected with the sea. In 1897, London traveled to Canada to seek his fortune in the gold rush in the Yukon region. The trip to the Klondike region of Yukon was a major turning point in London’s life. He found materials there that would allow him to express his major literary theme, the struggle for survival of strong men driven by primitive emotions. London’s first Klondike stories, collected in The Son of the Wolf (1900), made him a best-selling author.

London was fascinated with environmental determinism, which states that the world shapes us in ways we are powerless to resist. This is the theme of London’s two great animal novels. The Call of the Wild (1903) describes the adventures of Buck, a dog taken from California to Yukon. Buck learns to be brutal in order to survive. White Fang (1906) reverses the story. It portrays a wolf who, through the power of a human master’s love and kindness, turns from a savage beast into a loyal domestic animal. Among London’s other major novels are two that portray strong, brutal men who scorn conventional social attitudes—The Sea Wolf (1904) and the autobiographical Martin Eden (1909). In these and many other novels and essays, London attacked capitalism. His understanding and sympathy for the poor are strong elements in such works as The People of the Abyss (1903), a journalistic report on the poor and homeless living in London, England.

London’s life and work were filled with contradictions. He upheld a socialist ideal of collectivism, but he also held a cruelly individualistic notion of the survival of the fittest. He praised democracy, but he saw his own success as illustrating the rightness of the concept of the superman who stands above ordinary humanity and prevails by force of will. This philosophy had been developed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

London lived a hard life and suffered from ill health in his later years. He died, most likely of kidney failure, on Nov. 22, 1916, at just 40 years old. He left behind a remarkable literary legacy that included more than 50 fiction and non-fiction books, hundreds of short stories, numerous articles, and tens of thousands of pages of correspondence. London’s farm and country cottage—known as “Beauty Ranch”—in Glen Ellen, California, north of San Francisco, is now part of the Jack London State Historic Park.