Jack London grew up in the slum area of Oakland, California, a place which he later called “the cellar of society.” Born out of wedlock on January 12, 1876, he never knew his father, William Henry Chaney, who had left Jack’s mother, Flora Wellman, before Jack’s birth. On September 7, 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, from whom her son Jack took his name.
By the age of fifteen, London had turned delinquent. Barely seventeen, he signed aboard the schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for Japan and the Bering Sea. Returning from the voyage in 1894, London began to be interested in the plight of the underprivileged and working classes, so he joined a group of militant workers who were going to Washington to protest the wretched working conditions in the country, caused by the Depression of 1894. He did not reach Washington, however; he deserted this “Industrial Army” in Hannibal, Missouri, and for a time he traveled around the country as a hobo. At Niagara Falls, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to the Erie County Penitentiary. He was released after thirty days, and he quickly caught the first train heading West, arriving eventually in Oakland.
It was probably soon after his release from the penitentiary that London became seriously interested in politics, and as a result, he joined an Oakland branch of the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. Then soon afterward, he enrolled as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he attempted to further his studies in the most influential scientific and philosophic theories of the late nineteenth century—Darwinism, Social Darwinism, Nietzscheism, and Marxism. He soon became restless, though, and he left the university during his second semester as a student. From California, he went North, to the Klondike to search for gold, and his adventures there became the basis of many stories. In fact, two of his most famous novels, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, are set in the North, and while these two novels are perhaps his most famous in the United States, London is equally well known in places outside of the United States as the author of a number of socialistic works: The Iron Heel (1908), The War of the Classes (1905), Revolution and Other Essays (1910), and The People of the Abyss (1903). London has said that The People of the Abyss was his favorite book; it is a sociological study about the worst areas of poverty in London, England’s East End and is based on London’s first-hand experiences while he lived there.
Early in 1900, London married Bessie Maddern and began his career as a serious writer. He soon finished his first novel, A Daughter of the Snows, which was published in 1902, and in the summer of 1903, London met Charmian Kittredge, whom he promptly fell in love with and abruptly left his wife and two daughters for.
In ill health most of his life, by 1915, London was almost lame. His bowels gave him continual pain, and in order to reduce the pain, London began using opium and morphine, and it was not long before he became addicted to the drugs. As a consequence, his kidneys were also eventually wrecked by his misuse of all of the drugs, and London refused to even quit smoking, although he had cancer of the throat. By November 21,1916, London was in such poor health that he spent the entire day in bed. Then shortly before dawn the next day, he injected himself with what would prove to be an overdose of drugs. That evening, he died; he was forty years old. There is, naturally, some question as to whether his death was an intentional suicide.
