In the Library
The Sea-Wolf
Jack London, 1904
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 39
- Length
- Length 105k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Larsen is what London thought the superman would look like in a real forecastle, and this is the book he was answering.
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Jack London
London's other study of what survives when the rules are taken away, worked out in a dog rather than a schooner captain.
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About the book
A ferry goes down in the fog off San Francisco and a literary gentleman of thirty-five who has never done a day of physical work is fished out by a sealing schooner headed the wrong way. Her captain declines to put him ashore. Wolf Larsen may be the most frightening man in American fiction, and the reason is not the strength, though the strength is terrible. It is the bookshelf: Shakespeare, Tennyson, De Quincey, Darwin, and a complete Browning left open in his bunk at In a Balcony. He taught himself every page of it at sea, and what he took from it is that life is yeast, that the strong eat the weak, and that there is nothing further to be said. Humphrey Van Weyden spends the voyage arguing with him, losing, hardening, and beginning to suspect that the argument is the reason he is being kept alive. Bring your own answer and see how long it holds.