Plagued with debts throughout his life, London accepted an offer from Macmillan in 1902 for $2,000.00 for The Call of the Wild, which is all of the money that London ever received from what is perhaps his most famous book. In 1904, London decided to compose a "complete antithesis [and] companion piece" to The Call of the Wild. Instead of the devolution or the decivilization of a dog, he said, "I'm going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog . . . ." The result was White Fang, which appeared two years later, in 1906. In 1913, London published John Barleycorn, a book about his alcoholism, and a book that should be considered as a sincere tract describing the plight of the alcoholic.
While writing for only sixteen years, London produced an amazing body of work: nineteen novels, eighteen volumes of essays and short stories, and numerous other books, both sociological and autobiographical, and London's popularity has hardly ebbed over the years. The Call of the Wild has been translated into more than thirty languages, and it exists in millions of copies; sales and printing of White Fang are only slightly less in number than The Call of the Wild. Other popular London novels are Martin Eden (1909), The Valley of the Moon (1913), and the book which many critics feel comes closest to being the Great American Novel, The Sea Wolf (1904).
