Jack London

Jack London was born in 1876 in San Francisco, the illegitimate child of Flora Wellman and a wandering astrologer, William Henry Chaney. That same year, his mother married John London, a widower with two daughters, who gave the illegitimate boy his surname and the name John Griffith. In 1891, Jack London left school and took a job in a factory. In 1892, he served as an officer in the San Francisco Coast Guard, and in 1893, after a six-month voyage in the Pacific on the schooner Sophie Sutherland, he won first prize from a local newspaper "for the best descriptive article" about a typhoon off the coast of Japan. In 1895, he returned to school, and in 1896, he joined the Socialist Labor Party and enrolled at the University of Berkeley, where he stayed for only one semester. The next two years found him in Alaska, where he began to write professionally. In 1902, he passed through London, but by 1904 he was in the seas of Korea and Japan, as a correspondent for the Russo-Japanese War. Shortly thereafter (1906), he became a correspondent for another dramatic event: the earthquake that leveled San Francisco. The following years were spent writing and traveling to Hawaii, the leper colony of Molokai, Tahiti, the Fiji Islands, and Northern California, on a four-horse carriage. All his great works were born along the way, amidst much drinking and tropical diseases, until he died in 1916 from uremia, according to the medical diagnosis of the time, while the theory of suicide was raised twenty-two years later by Irving Stone. Shortly before that same year, he had resigned from the Socialist Party "because it had lost its fighting spirit and no longer concerned itself with the class struggle."