Jack London’s stories were written largely out of his own life. If they
were not actual experiences cast in fiction form, they were narratives
spun out of the fiber of his own experiences. Life was never certain
for London. He was always on the go, and his life was an ever vigorous,
vital _present_, with the future undetermined and unguessed. He was
born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. When he was eleven years
old he left his ranch in the Livermore Valley and set out to satisfy
his longing for a knowledge of the world and an expression of himself.
He first went to Oakland, where, in the public library, he came under
the romantic influence of such fiction writers as Washington Irving,
Ouida and others. Out of Irving’s “Alhambra” he built castles in
the air for himself, and launched upon a great literary career with
a strong under-current of romance and an irresistible longing for
adventure. He left home and joined the oyster pirates in San Francisco
Bay. Then, tiring of the excitement of piracy, he turned with equal
enthusiasm to the prosecution of it by joining the Fish Patrol, and
was entrusted with the arrest of some who were his former comrades.
Thrilling accounts of this life appeared under the title of “Tales
of a Fish Patrol.” In them is a wild buccaneer spirit, and the savor
of the sea. Those of us that read the “Sea Wolf” can find there a
passionate expression of the author’s own experiences before the mast
while seal hunting in Behring Sea or along the coast of Japan. It is
full of strong appealing character and strange sea lore. The same wild
breath of adventure is to be found in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore,” in
which London describes thrilling experiences in a trip around the Horn.
London was a worker, and labored hard among the rougher elements of
life--with longshoremen and shovellers in San Francisco; in factories
and on the decks of coastwise vessels. He was as good a tramp, too,
as he was a laboring man. He walked the Continent over from ocean to
ocean, gathering the materials for a “vast understanding of the common
man.” Out of these experiences came “The Road,” which is an appealing
record of sympathy with the vagrant poor, and an absorbing narrative of
adventurous journeying.
London tried schooling at different times in his early life, working
between hours to pay for his education. After several months of stern,
hard application, in which he covered about three years’ preparatory
work, he entered the University of California. The strain, however, of
work and study combined was too much for him, and after three months
he had to give up. Turning to things quite different, and with a
desperate hope that he might find fresh inspiration in a new kind of
life, he set off for the widely advertised Klondike to seek for gold.
In the Klondike “nobody talks; everybody thinks; you get your true
perspective; I got mine,” he says. After a year of hard toil in the
north, London returned home and assumed the burden of supporting his
family, his father having died while he was away. He wrote story upon
story, and finally gained acceptance and success. As book after book
came out, the public grew to know and recognize Jack London as one of
the strongest figures in American fiction.
He passed away on November 22, 1916, in the full swing of his
intellectual vigor, and it will be long before his splendid achievement
is forgotten, or the last of his books is consigned to the high shelves
that spell oblivion. No matter how sparing one may be in the use of
the word genius, for him it could be claimed. His name is one of the
few among those of the writing men of our time with which the magic
word is, without hesitation, to be linked. There was genius in his
invention, in his imagery, in his nervous style. To him was given to
know the moods of Arctic wastes and California valleys. The struggles
of his own soul and mind and body he dissected and portrayed in
“Martin Eden” (1909) and “John Barleycorn” (1913). He was practically
the only American writer to invade magnificently the prize-ring as a
field for romantic narrative. Its seamy side, its sordid corruption,
its driftage, as well as its brutal heroism, are reflected in such
tales as “The Game,” “The Abysmal Brute,” “The Shadow and the Flash,”
and “The Mexican.” “The Call of the Wild” (1903) challenges the very
best dog-stories of all time. “The Sea Wolf” (1904) is an epic of salt
brine, and creaking rigging, and man’s inhumanity to man, and the
“blond masters of the world.” There followed “Burning Daylight” (1910),
and “The Valley of the Moon” (1913), and “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”
(1914), which is “The Sea Wolf” “in a lower key,” and “The Strength of
the Strong” (1914), and a dozen more. Whatever the field, there was a
sureness of touch, and a power of graphic description that made the man
always a figure and a force.
[Illustration: REX BEACH]
_Rex Beach_