John Griffith London was born in 1876 in a working class section of San Francisco, the only child of piano teacher/spiritualist Flora Wellman and itinerant astrologer William Chaney. The couple was never married while together, and Chaney deserted the pregnant Flora, who then attempted suicide. Rescued by friends, she had the baby but was too ill to nurse him. He was sent to live with Virginia Prentiss, a former slave who had recently had a stillborn child and could nurse the boy. Nine months after the birth, Flora married John London, an aging, disabled Civil War veteran with two daughters of his own. The family moved frequently about the Bay Area, following John London’s various jobs, and eventually settled in Oakland.
Jack London’s stepfather, John London
Young Johnny, as he was known, went to work at an early age to help the family, at a cannery, as a paperboy, in a bowling alley.
To escape the grimness of his childhood, Johnny became an avid reader, and learned to sail on San Francisco Bay. When not on the water, he immersed himself in adventure yarns, encouraged by Oakland librarian Ina Coolbrith (later to become California’s first Poet Laureate.) As a teenager, he fell in with a boisterous crowd of oyster pirates along the Oakland waterfront, drinking by day and raiding oyster beds at night. He later switched sides and became a deputy fish patrolman. Now known as Jack, at the age of 17 he shipped out on the seal-hunting schooner Sophia Sutherland for seven months. He later won a newspaper contest with an essay based on the trip, and used his sea experiences as background for his novel The Sea Wolf.
Returning home, London found depression, unemployment and labor unrest. He became a tramp, riding the rails and joining a march of the unemployed on Washington. He wound up at Niagara Falls, where he was tossed in jail without a trial for 30 days for vagrancy. This experience had a profound effect on the teenage London, who began to question America’s socioeconomic system after experiencing the depths of society in the Erie County Penitentiary. He later chronicled his vagabond experiences in The Road.
Heading back to the West Coast, London resolved to gain more education, vowing that he did not want to become, in his words, a “work beast”, but rather live the life of a “brain merchant.” He became more interested in Socialism and intellectual pursuits, discovering Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. He joined a debating society, and began practicing street corner oratory, becoming known as “the Boy Socialist of Oakland.” Lasting just one semester before dropping out of U.C. Berkeley for lack of funds, he decided that becoming a writer was his best chance at using his brain for a living. His amateurish efforts, however, collected nothing but rejection slips.
Unsuccessful as a writer, seemingly trapped in the underclass, Jack was at a crossroads when the steamship Excelsior docked in San Francisco in July of 1897, disgorging 40 miners and a ton of Yukon gold. A week later, Jack London was headed north, among the first wave of novice prospectors heading to the Klondike Gold Rush. As he later wrote: “I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure path again in quest of fortune.”
Fortune seekers ascending the Chilkoot Pass, Alaska 1897
London spent less than a year in the Klondike, spending more time in saloons soaking up atmosphere than actual mining. Coming home with only $4.50 in gold dust and a bad case of scurvy, he had discovered something far greater. “It was in the Klondike I found myself,” he later wrote. “There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get your true perspective. I got mine.”
Jack‘s stepfather John London had died while he was gone, and he discovered that his real father was Chaney, the vagabond astrologer. He wrote to the old man, who denied his paternity. This was to prove a pivotal blow to Jack, who thereafter put forth a carefully crafted mythical identity for himself as a descendant of pre-Revolutionary War “Viking” stock, with John London as his father.
Back home in Oakland, Jack found himself the sole family breadwinner, and plunged into writing as a profession with the spark of his Yukon experiences. Fortunately, it was the Golden Age of magazines in America, as new printing methods had made mass production cheaper. Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, Colliers, Century, Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post and many others became America’s primary entertainment medium. Carefully studying the market, London soon sold his first short stories. Thereafter, writing 1000 words every day, six days a week, Jack London sold almost everything he wrote for the next 17 years.
When success finally came, it came quickly. The public was hungry for stories of realism and adventure in the new century. Soon London had a book contract as well as a wife, abruptly marrying his reserved former tutor, Bess Maddern. Although the marriage was one of convenience rather than love, the couple promptly found themselves with two daughters. They settled in the Oakland Hills, where Jack liked to entertain the intellectual and literary friends that would soon become known as “The Crowd.”
Joan, Becky and Bess Maddern London
During this time, London departed for England to write a sociological expose of the slums of London, The People of the Abyss. He researched the book by living anonymously in the East End for two months, continuing the pattern he had established of inserting himself into a foreign culture in order to write about it from a “native’s” point of view.
Upon his return home, he began writing a short story for the Saturday Evening Post that was to be called “The Sleeping Wolf.” It became The Call of the Wild, a milestone in American literature. Hugely popular, the powerful mythic story of a pet St. Bernard who devolves into wild wolf-dog brought London worldwide acclaim, and it has never been out of print in more than 100 years. H.L. Mencken wrote, “No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in The Call of the Wild.”
For his part, London said it was supposed to be a simple dog story that “got away from me,” and claimed it a lucky “shot in the dark.” In any case, it firmly established his international reputation, and remains his best-known work. He followed it with The Sea Wolf, a brutal examination of Nietzschian concepts based on his sailing experiences, and White Fang, an “evolution” counterpart to The Call of the Wild. His apocalyptic Socialist novel The Iron Heel predicted the rise of fascism, and the atavistic fable Before Adam was an exploration of his interest in Darwin. As London archivist Sara Hodson says, “Armed both with life experiences and with the fruits of his sojourns through the works of the world's greatest thinkers and philosophers, he sought in his own writings to find the answers to life's great questions.”
Jack London was now the highest-paid writer in America, and along with Mark Twain, the most famous. Publishers clamored for his services. He got lucrative journalism assignments to report on the Russo-Japanese War and the San Francisco Earthquake.
San Francisco’s ruined skyline, 1906. Photo by Jack London
He embarked on sold-out Socialist lecture tours to Harvard, Yale and Carnegie Hall. And he also became involved with a vivacious female member of “The Crowd” five years his senior named Charmian Kittredge. Jack separated from Bess, and married Charmian in 1905, the day after his divorce was final. Self-reliant, sexually frank and adventurous, she was to be his faithful “mate-woman” to the end of his days.
Charmian Kittredge London
At the height of his fame in 1906, Jack made two more momentous decisions; he began buying pasture land near the village of Glen Ellen north of San Francisco, and he began planning his next great adventure, a seven-year, around-the-world voyage on a boat that he would design himself, the Snark. The boat was plagued by construction delays and cost overruns. When the Londons finally set sail in April of 1907, the voyage was six months behind schedule, the boat leaked, the engine failed and the “captain,” Charmian’s uncle, was found to be unacquainted with navigation. Jack had to take over the controls to get them to Hawaii.
On the Snark en route to Hawaii
Finally docking in Honolulu after being presumed lost, the Londons spent five months there as the Snark was repaired, being wined and dined by Hawaiian colonial society. It was to prove a crucial turning point in Jack’s awareness. Having always insisted on the primacy of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” in Hawaii he saw a harmonious, multi-cultural society where different races mixed freely, and the society seemed more egalitarian as a result. It was perhaps the first instance when he considered the incongruity between his socialism and his racialism.
London’s resulting stories of Hawaii were not about the high society of his hosts, but rather of leprosy, racism, oppression of the natives and their culture, and the hypocrisy of the Hawaiian ruling class. Many Hawaiians were angered by London’s focus on what they perceived as negative aspects of their islands, but he had again merely injected himself into another culture and point of view.
Charmian has a good laugh with Molokai residents, 1907
With a heavily retrofitted Snark and a new crew, the Londons set sail for the Marquesas and Melanesia, where they would encounter headhunters, cannibalism and disease. The crew grew increasingly ill with “Solomon Island sores” and malaria, and Jack took to treating himself with corrosive sublimate of mercury. It was ironically this treatment that would hasten his death from kidney disease years later.
The Snark trip was finally abandoned, two-and-a-half years after it began. Although a failure, the trip did produce “Martin Eden,” one of London’s best novels. He later explored the darker side of his South Pacific experience in the short story collection South Sea Tales and in several novels.
Back in California, but Jack poured most of his energies into what he called his Beauty Ranch. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts and Efficiency Movements of the Progressive Era, London was ahead of his time in his devotion to organic agronomy and sustainable farming, and applied those concepts as he built his ranch. He strove to regenerate what he saw as land wasted by generations before him- yet another frontier to explore.
As London bought up more and more land, going further into debt, he began to design and build his redwood and stone dream home, Wolf House. London had to continuously churn out books and articles to support these grand plans, and the frequency with which he did so was to cost him in critical reputation. Yet he continued to experiment with different themes and fictional forms, writing singular stories like “Told in the Drooling Ward,” related by a mentally-challenged narrator, and the haunting science fiction tale “The Red One.” He also wrote a trilogy of “Sonoma” novels with pastoral, back-to-the-land themes: Burning Daylight, The Valley of the Moon and The Little Lady of the Big House.
“The brain merchant” at work
After more than two years of construction, just weeks before Jack and Charmian were to move in, Wolf House burned to the ground in a suspicious fire. It was a devastating blow to Jack, who vowed to rebuild the mansion. He was to run out of time, however, and its ruins stand on the side of Sonoma Mountain to this day.
London read Jung’s “Psychology of the Unconscious” in the spring of 1916 and told Charmian: “I tell you I am standing on the edge of a world so new, so wonderful that I am almost afraid to look over into it.” Jung’s concepts greatly influenced his work in the last six months of his life, as his stories became more consciously mythic and psychological. He resigned from the Socialist Party, having found a new philosophy with which to explore Life’s Big Questions.
Jack London, 1914
It was not to happen as London, long debilitated by kidney disease, lapsed into a coma on Nov. 21, 1916 and died the following evening. Although there was speculation that London had committed suicide- mainly because some of his most famous literary creations took that path- there was no evidence to support this, and the cause of death was listed as uremia.
Charmian lived nearly 40 more years on the ranch, scrupulously protecting Jack’s memory and the secret of his paternity. Her ashes are buried next to Jack’s under an oak-shaded boulder on the Beauty Ranch, now preserved as a California State Park.