Jack London

American · 1876 to 1916

Born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, the son of an itinerant astrologer who denied paternity and a spiritualist music teacher who shot herself in the head when he refused, he was raised in Oakland by his mother and her new husband John London, whose name he took. He was wet-nursed by a former slave called Virginia Prentiss, whom he later called his first source of love. At thirteen he was working fourteen-hour days at Hickmott's Cannery in Oakland; at fifteen he borrowed money from Prentiss to buy a sloop and become an oyster pirate in San Francisco Bay; at seventeen he shipped as an able-bodied seaman on the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland to the coast of Japan. He read Marx on the road as a hobo, did a month for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary, crammed a year's high school into one summer to scrape into Berkeley, and joined the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, returning with no gold but a notebook of Yukon faces. The Son of the Wolf (1900) launched his career; The Call of the Wild (1903), written in a month, made him an international celebrity. He built the schooner Snark and sailed the South Pacific, ran for mayor of Oakland twice on the Socialist ticket, accumulated a personal library of fifteen thousand volumes, and at the peak of his fame was the highest-paid writer in America. He died on November 22, 1916, at his ranch in Glen Ellen, California, at the age of forty, of kidney failure complicated by morphine he was taking for the pain, and was buried under a mossy boulder above his unfinished Wolf House.