Mark Sundeen at The Believer:
Twenty-five years after I read The Call of the Wild, my interest in Jack London was sparked by Sailor on Horseback, Irving Stone’s lurid 1938 biography. As Stone tells it, London’s life was as romantic and ruggedly American as any novel ever written. He was born poor in San Francisco in 1876 to an unwed spiritualist. His father was most likely an itinerant astrologist who never fessed up to paternity. Jack grew up in the crushing poverty of the Oakland slums, quitting school to work in a cannery at age thirteen. By fifteen he was a regular at the waterfront saloons, had bought a sloop called the Razzle Dazzle, and was cruising the bay as an oyster pirate. London shipped out to Japan on a seal-hunting ship at seventeen, worked in a jute mill and as a coal shoveler, then at eighteen traversed the country on freight trains, serving a month in a prison camp in upstate New York for vagrancy. Convinced that hard labor would kill him, London completed high school in a single year and then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. He was proclaimed the “Boy Socialist” because of the soapbox oratories he delivered at Oakland City Hall Park. But Jack had already outgrown the college campus: “The life there was healthful and athletic, but too juvenile,” he would later write. “I had bucked with big men. I knew mysterious and violent things.” After running out of money during his second semester, Jack quit college and steamed north to prospect for gold, returned home empty-handed, determined to become a writer. In 1903, at the age of twenty-seven, he wrote The Call of the Wild, for which he was paid a total of two thousand dollars; the book brought immediate worldwide fame and over the next century would sell millions of copies.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.