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 Romanticism |
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Special
Collections of American Novels
Jack London (1876-1916)
John
Griffith London was born on January 12, 1876, the illegitimate son of W.
H. Chaney. London, who never saw his real father, took the name of his
stepfather. He grew up in extreme poverty: from earliest youth he
supported himself with menial and dangerous jobs, experiencing
profoundly the struggle for survival that most other writers and
intellectuals knew only from observation or books. Later
he determined to educate himself in order to improve his own condition
and that of others.
With an intellectual energy that matched his physical strength, London quickly completed high school and spent a semester reading prodigiously as a special student at the University of California. London believed at the same time in the inevitable triumph of the strongest individuals. London's sincere intellectual and personal involvement in the socialist movement is recorded in such novels and polemical works as The People of the Abyss (1903), The Iron Heel (1908), The War of the Classes (1905), and Revolution (1910); his competing, deeply felt commitment to the fundamental reality of the law of survival and the will to power is dramatized in his most popular novels, The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904). The contradiction between these competing beliefs is most vividly projected in the patently autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909), a central document for the London scholar.
London
continued to write until his death in 1916, widely supposed to have been
suicide. He had not, moreover, reconciled his contradictory views of
man's nature and destiny. But London's stories of man in and against
nature continue to be popular all over the world. In them, London strips
everything down to the symbolic starkness of dream, to a primordial
simplicity that has the a strange and compelling power of ancient myth.
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Martin
Eden (1909)
The Call of the Wild
(1903)
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