Alameda-San Francisco County CA Archives Biographies.....London, Jack  January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916
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Ila Wakley iwakley@msn.com October 26, 2010, 12:10 pm

Source: California and Californians, Vol. IV, Published 1932, Pages  80 - 81
Author: The Lewis Publishing Company

     JACK LONDON. It is doubtful if any man ever crowded so many adventures — 
of the body and of the mind — into the short space of forty years as Jack 
London. His energy, both physical and mental, was prodigious; his vitality 
overwhelming; his endurance incomparable. He was, like many of his characters, 
a veritable superman, and yet, personally, he was a sweet, as unspoiled, as 
wholesome as a boy.

     There is something gloriously youthful in everything he did and wrote.   
His thirst for adventure, his passionate propaganda for socialism and human 
justice, his exuberant and sometimes extravagant — but supremely vital — 
writings are the very essence of healthy, impetuous, idealistic youth. 

     His whole life centered about San Francisco Bay. He was born in San 
Francisco, January 12, 1876. At four he lived on a truck farm in Alameda; at 
seven on another farm in San Mateo County; then at Livermore, and finally his 
parents settled in Oakland, where he went to school, sold newspapers, explored 
the water front and the underworld, drank and adventured as a small boat 
pirate, became a soapbox Socialist, studied and wrote.

     Before he was nineteen he made a long voyage before the mast, tramped 
across the continent and back again in real tramp style, suffered and 
struggled as a common workman at the hardest labor, and then, settling down 
for a time, in three shorts months of study prepared himself to enter the 
University of California. But he was off again in 1898 to the Klondike, 
following the lure of adventure and hoping for a little gold. Of adventure he 
found aplenty; of gold none. Stricken with scurvy, he made a 1,900 mile trip 
down the Yukon in an open boat, and then returned to Oakland, determined to 
picture what he had seen in stories.

     The Overland Monthly bought his first story in 1899. An Eastern magazine 
followed suit soon after. His brilliant stories of the North announced a new 
writer of power, and "The Call of the Wild," published in 1903, made him 
famous. It remains today his most artistic hook, and the one that will 
probably live longer than anything else he wrote.

     He went on adventuring after he had arrived. He was correspondent for the 
Hearst papers in the Russo-Japanese war; in 1906 he set out in a small boat, 
the Snork, on a voyage around the world; he lived among the poor in the slums 
of London to study social conditions; he was a correspondent in Mexico in 
1914; he fought with a passionate recklessness, for Socialism; in one of the 
last of the sailing ships he went around Cape Horn from Baltimore to Seattle.
     
     All of the time he was writing. His literary productivity was greater 
than that of any man of his day.

     When he died, November 22, 1916, at his ranch in the Valley of the Moon, 
the European papers devoted more space to him than to Emperor Franz Joseph, 
who died at the same time. His books are so many chapters from his own 
biography, each revealing some phase of his personality.

     He was a great companion, an incomparable friend. He trained, helped and 
encouraged scores of struggling young writers. In his personality, life and 
style he has had a greater influence upon the young writers of America than 
any other man. In their work, as well as in the best that came from his own 
hurried and exuberant pen, he will live and be remembered. The blood of the 
pioneers was in his veins; in him the last frontier had its supreme spokesman —
 young, questing, adventurous and prophetic.—By Eric Howard. 

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