Jack London

Works

Short stories

Western writer and history Dale L. Walker writeshttp://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/part1.html:

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:London's true métier was the short story....London's true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed. His stories that run longer than the magic 7,500 generally—but certainly not always—could have benefitted from self-editing.

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London's "strength of utterance" is at its height in his stories, and they are painstakingly well-constructed. (In contrast, many of his novels, including The Call of the Wild, are weakly constructed, episodic, and resemble linked sequences of short stories).

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"To Build a Fire" is the best known of all his stories, probably deservedly so. Other fine stories from his Klondike period include: "All Gold Canyon," about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; "The Law of Life," about an aging man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; and "Love of Life," about a desperate trek by a prospector across the Canadian taiga.

Related Topics:
Gold - Prospector - Claim jumper

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"Moon Face" invites comparison with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Related Topics:
Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart

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Jack London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer himself. "A Piece of Steak" is an evocative tale about a match between an older boxer and a younger one. "The Mexican" combines boxing with a social theme, as a young Mexican endures an unfair fight and ethnic prejudice in order to earn money with which to aid the Mexican revolution.

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A surprising number of Jack London's stories would today be classified as science fiction. "The Unparalleled Invasion" describes germ warfare against China. "Goliah" revolves around an irresistible energy weapon. "The Shadow and the Flash" is a highly original tale about two competitive brothers who take two different routes to achieving invisibility. "A Relic of the Pliocene" is a tall tale about an encounter of a modern-day man with a mammoth. "The Red One" tells of an island tribe held in thrall by an extraterrestrial object. (And his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, meets the contemporary definition of "Soft" science fiction).

Related Topics:
Science fiction - Germ warfare - Dystopia - The Iron Heel - "Soft" science fiction

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Novels

Jack London's most famous work is The Call of the Wild. Critic Maxwell Geismar called it "a beautiful prose poem," editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn," and novelist E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece."

Related Topics:
The Call of the Wild - E. L. Doctorow

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Nevertheless, as Dale L. Walkerhttp://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/part1.html commented:

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: an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.

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It is often observed his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes]:

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:The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device... Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn... is a synoptic series of short episodes.

Related Topics:
The Star Rover - Smoke Bellew - John Barleycorn

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Even The Call of the Wild, which Walker calls a "long short story," is picaresque or episodic.

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In addition to The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden are widely admired.

Related Topics:
The Call of the Wild - The Sea-Wolf - The Iron Heel - Martin Eden

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Ambrose Bierce called The Sea-Wolf "the great thing?and it is among the greatest of things?is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime." However, many agree with Bierce that "The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful."

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The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel which anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jack London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here. Its description of the capitalist class forming an organised, totalitarian, violent oligarchy to crush the working-class forewarned in some detail the Fascist dictatorships of Europe. Given it was written in 1908, this prediction was somewhat uncanny, as Trotsky noted while commenting on the book in the 30s.

Related Topics:
The Iron Heel - Dystopian - George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four - Totalitarian - Oligarchy - Fascist - Trotsky

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Martin Eden is a novel about a struggling young writer with a very strong resemblance to Jack London.

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Nonfiction and autobiographical memoirs

He was commissioned to write The People of the Abyss (1903), an investigation into the slum conditions in which the poor lived in the capital of the British empire. London did not write favorably about London.

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The Road (1907) is a series of tales and reminiscences of Jack London's hobo days. It relates the tricks that hoboes used to evade train crews, and reminisces about his travels with Kelly's Army. He credits his story-telling skill to the hobo's necessity of concocting tales to coax meals from sympathetic strangers.

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Jack London's autobiographical book of "alcoholic memoirs," John Barleycorn, was published in 1913. Recommended by Alcoholics Anonymous, it depicts the outward and inward life of an alcoholic. The passages depicting his interior mental state, which he called the "White Logic," are among his strongest and most evocative writing. The question must, however, be raised: is it truly against alcohol, or a love hymn to alcohol? He makes alcohol sound exciting, dangerous, comradely, glamorous, manly. In the end, when he sums it up, this is the total he comes up with:

Related Topics:
John Barleycorn - Alcoholics Anonymous

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:And so I pondered my problem. I should not care to revisit all these fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before. Glass in hand! There is a magic in the phrase. It means more than all the words in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.

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:No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion.

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The Cruise of the Snark (1913) is a memoir of Jack and Charmian London's 1907-1909 voyage across the Pacific. His descriptions of "surf-riding," which he dubbed a "royal sport," helped introduce it to and popularize it with the mainland. London writes:

Related Topics:
Charmian London - Surf-riding

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:Through the white crest of a breaker suddenly appears a dark figure, erect, a man-fish or a sea-god, on the very forward face of the crest where the top falls over and down, driving in toward shore, buried to his loins in smoking spray, caught up by the sea and flung landward, bodily, a quarter of a mile. It is a Kanaka on a surf-board. And I know that when I have finished these lines I shall be out in that riot of colour and pounding surf, trying to bit those breakers even as he, and failing as he never failed, but living life as the best of us may live it.

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Apocrypha

Jack London Credo

Jack London's literary executor, Irving Shepard, quoted a "Jack London Credo" in an introduction to a 1956 collection of Jack London stories:

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:I would rather be ashes than dust!

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:I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

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:I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

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:The function of man is to live, not to exist.

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:I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

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:I shall use my time.

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Jack London scholars and aficionados find the style and sentiment very characteristic of the man, but according to Clarice Stasz no actual source has yet been found. The phrase "I would rather be ashes than dust" appears in a 1916 newspaper story about Jack London, in an inscription he wrote in an autograph book. In the short story ?By The Turtles of Tasman,? a character, defending her ne?er-do-well grasshopperish father to her antlike uncle, says: ?...my father has been a king. He has lived.... Have you lived merely to live? Are you afraid to die? I?d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet. When you are dust, my father will be ashes."

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The Scab

A short diatribe on "The Scab" is often quoted within the labor movement and frequently attributed to Jack London. It opens:

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:After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue....

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This does not seem to appear in his published work. Although he did give a speech entitled "The Scab" to the Oakland Socialist Party Local on April 5, 1903, this speech, published in The War of the Classes, contains nothing similar to the "rattlesnake, toad, and vampire" quotation. It is completely different from it in content, style, and tone. One online source, no longer accessible, gave a chain of citations credits the diatribe as having been published in The Bridgeman, official organ of the Structural Iron Workers, which in turned credited the Elevator Constructor, official journal of the International Union of Elevator Constructors, which credited the Oregon Labor Press as publishing it in 1926.

Related Topics:
April 5 - 1903

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Might is Right

Anton LaVey's Church of Satan claims that "Ragnar Redbeard," pseudonymous author of the 1896 book Might is Right, was Jack London. No London biographers mention any such possibility.

Related Topics:
Anton LaVey - Ragnar Redbeard - Might is Right

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B. Traven

During the 1930s, the enigmatic novelist B. Traven, best known in the U. S. as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was hailed as "the German Jack London." His politics, themes, writing style, and settings really do bear a recognizable resemblance to Jack London's. Traven kept his identity secret during his life. Almost every commentator on Traven mentions in passing a fanciful speculation Traven actually was Jack London, who presumably would have had to have faked his own death. It is not clear whether this suggestion was ever made seriously. No London biographer has even bothered to mention it. The identification of Traven with London is one of many such speculations—another unlikely one being Ambrose Bierce—which were laid to rest by a 1990 interview in which Traven's widow identified Traven as Ret Marut, a left-wing revolutionary in Germany during World War I.

Related Topics:
B. Traven - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

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