Jack London

The life of Jack London (1876- 1916) reads exactly like the plot of one of his adventure stories. He was born John Chaney, the illegitimate son of an itinerant Irish- American astrologer and Flora Wellman, the black sheep of a well- to- do family. Before Jack was one year old, Flora had married a groccer called John London and settled into a life of poverty in Pennsylvania.

Young Jack increasingly found escape from the grimness in his surroundings in books borrowed from the local library; his reading was guided by the kindly local librarian. But when he was only fifteen, he left home and travelled around North America as a tramp. He even served thirty days in prison once on a charge of vagrancy.

By the time he was nineteen, he could drink and curse as well as his fellow boatmen in California. but he had never lost his love of reading, and his socialist creed also stressed the importance of education; by dint of cramming all his lost schooling into a few months, he managed to gain entry into the University of California. He soon left, however, and in 1896 was caught up in the gold rush to the Klondike river in north-west Canada. He returned from there with no gold at all, but with the seed of a story which in 1903 became a huge bestseller- The Call of the Wild.

His very next novel was the Sea Wolf (1904), one of the most exciting sea stories ever written, and bassed as usual on Jack's own experiences as a sailor in the early 1890's. By 1913 he was the highest paid and most widely read writer in the world. He spent all his money, however, on his friends, on drinking, and especially on building himself a castle- like house, which was destroyed by fire before completion. Financial difficulties forced him to drive himself mercilessly, and to drink heavily, until he could stand no more. In 1916, at the age of forty, Jack London took his own life.