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This chapter discusses Jack London's views about war and imperialism. In February 1906, London and his wife Charmian were preparing for worldwide sailing adventures to begin next autumn. To London the trip around the world meant personal achievement and big moments of living. At this time, war and empire were the furthest things from his thoughts. The plan called for Jack and Charmian Kittredge London to sail in October from San Francisco's Golden Gate across the Pacific to Hawaii, then into the South Seas, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean. “We expect to spend from one to several months in every country in Europe,” London proclaimed. This chapter recounts London's experience with the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and considers its impact on him. It also looks at two novels written by London after the earthquake, Before Adam and The Iron Heel, and goes on to provide details about his eighteen-month voyage aboard the Snark.

This chapter examines Jack London's denunciation of what he perceived was America's cruel social conditions by offering his own life story as a case study in the novel Martin Eden. In 1909, Jack and Charmian London began the homeward voyage from Hawaii and the South Seas. Nearly completed, Martin Eden was to be published in the fall, and Jack thought the new novel was the best he had ever written. However, the book received negative reviews from critics. This chapter considers London's reaction to Martin Eden's poor critical reception as well as his dispute with eugenicist and ichthyologist David Starr Jordan over the poem, “The Man with a Hoe,” composed by a schoolteacher named Edwin Markham. It also discusses London's use of his fiction, including the novels The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf, to draw public empathy for his campaign for social change.

This chapter focuses on Jack London's early childhood, family life, education, and career. London was born in 1876, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence. His mother, Flora Wellman, migrated to the West Coast and met the astrologer William H. Chaney. When Flora refused to accept Chaney's ultimatum to abort her pregnancy, he deserted her. Flora named her newborn John Griffith Chaney, who would become Jack London after his mother married Civil War veteran and widower John London. This chapter examines the significance of the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 in London's life, along with his early fiction such as The Son of the Wolf, A Daughter of the Snows, Children of the Frost, The Cruise of the Dazzler, The People of the Abyss, and The Call of the Wild. It also considers London's struggle against black melancholy, injury, and sickness throughout his life as well as the impact of racism of his era on his writings.

This chapter focuses on Jack London's fight against the unbridled capitalism that he believed was the root cause of the pandemic of human misery and degradation during his time, along with his efforts to swing public opinion to his side in the late 1890s. Over London's lifetime, the capitalists had transformed America into an economic system that he accused of being exploitative. The last quarter of the nineteenth century—the years of London's life—was dubbed the era of Big Business, that is, the era of triumphant laissez-faire capitalism. This chapter examines how London fought this economic system by drawing on the popularity of boxing, both its figures of speech and its ideology of blows exchanged over many rounds. It also considers London's promotion of socialism that pit him against Ivy Ledbetter Lee; they waged their battle in the court—on the canvas—of public opinion.

This chapter focuses on Jack London's campaign for prison reform which he articulated in the 1915 novel The Star Rover (published as The Jacket in England). After becoming aware of provocative issues that swirled about the criminal justice system in the 1910s, London decided to write a prison novel. This was a novel that would challenge and change public assumptions about crime and imprisonment. The Star Rover/The Jacket was based on the life story of Edward Morrell, a former San Joaquin Valley gang member and ex-convict who frequently lectured on the need for prison reform. The novel raised the stakes of reform by exposing the horrors of the straitjacket and other death-dealing torments inflicted by public officials on prisoners. The Star Rover/The Jacket's revelations about the prisons, the use of the straitjacket, and torture were made known to the public.

This chapter argues that one of Jack London's most consistent concerns throughout his career was the place of the machine in modern life, and his engagements with the discourses of racial formation and socialism (and his complicated attempts to both reproduce and transcend them) are consistent with this technologically deterministic concern. London's vision of Asia/Pacific, in other words, was as much a product of his hopes and fears about modern technology as it was of any rigid, biological theories of racial difference. Indeed, when viewed through the prism of his concerns about the role of technology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century capitalism, London's seemingly contradictory characterizations of various Asian/Pacific people become much more coherent (if still firmly rooted in a racialized, Eurocentric worldview).

This chapter focuses on Jack London's expansion of his California Beauty Ranch as part of his commitment to sustainable farming. London wanted to educate the American public about the present national crisis in agriculture and the urgent need for reform in America's farm fields, pastures, and barns. London became preoccupied with ranching after taking the deed to the 130-acre Hill Ranch in 1905, and soon he was purchasing adjacent ranches as the La Motte in 1908, the Caroline Kohler and Fish ranches in 1909, and the Freund Ranch in 1913. He followed the advice of F. H. King's Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan (1911), as well as the example of Leo Tolstoy's farmer in Anna Karenina. This chapter examines how London was able to turn Beauty Ranch into a flourishing agricultural experiment station and model for American agriculture. It also considers two of his novels, The Valley of the Moon and The Little Lady of the Big House.

This chapter places Jack London’s autobiography John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs as the key text for understanding the figure of the Existential drinker. It is one of the first all-out formulations of the writer-as-drinker, mixing the nineteenth-century temperance view of the habitual drinker who is a moral failure with the image of himself as a drinker who can attain truths not available to the fall-in-the-gutter drunkard, nor indeed available to the run-of-the-mill sober citizen. The chapter deals with London’s idea of ‘the white logic’, that is, the attraction of alcohol as a means to enlightenment, while at the same time acknowledging that to choose this path is also to choose death. The chapter therefore covers questions of mortality, finitude, types of drinkers and drunkenness, early aspects of Existential philosophy (London partly draws on Nietzsche), as well as beginning consideration of the writer in relation to texts where drinking is central.

In 1915, Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote to her old friend and fellow writer Jack London (1876-1916) to upbraid him for failing to write a novel that truthfully depicted the life of a modern woman, and by extension, companionate marriage. Companionate marriage was a rational system based in idealism, tailor-made for the Progressive Era and for revolutionists such as Austin and London in Greenwich Village, who shared their era’s enthusiasm for scientific systems. Austin and London protested conventional forms of marriage both from the sociological standpoint of its unnecessary conventions and from its failure to account for the irrationality of sexual desire and its dampening effect on genius. Yet their accounts of unconventional unions reveal another set of problems. Pitting conventional marriage against its more revolutionary counterparts, Austin, in A Woman of Genius and Number 26 Jayne Street, and London, in “Planchette” (1908) and Little Lady of the Big House (1916), critique conventional marriage but also cast a cold eye on its Bohemian alternatives, revealing the gap between the ideal and the real in progressive marriage by highlighting the stubborn realities of gender inequality and of the irrational desire, cast in London’s “Planchette” as the supernatural world, that plagued their idealistic efforts.

This book examines Jack London's (1876–1916) campaign for progressive reform throughout a career spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A prolific author known for his best-selling fiction such as The Call of the Wild (1903), London exerted great leverage for social change in a crucial moment of American history. Through published essays and public speeches, he made the case for a socialism that “attempts to make a better world for the human.” From his early twenties until his death, London compiled a formidable database of books, pamphlets, and newspaper and magazine articles filled with his own commentary about issues ranging from politics and religion to race, women's concerns, labor strikes, health, tax policy, and warfare. This book investigates the role of London's extraordinary files—estimated at 50,000—as the foundational basis of his career as both a writer and public intellectual. It considers London's revelations about the miseries and injustices of the contemporary American scene—and about the urgent need for reform.

This chapter analyses how the formations of modernism in Australia, and in particular the political achievement of Federation, significantly altered the country’s relationship to the United States. It starts by discussing the legacy of transportation and the links between Irish American and Irish Australian cultures, as manifested in the poetry and fiction of John Boyle O’Reilly. It goes on to show how Jack London mediated the claims of primitivism, anthropology and mass media during his trip to Australia and the South Pacific. Finally, it considers how an Australian national narrative predicated upon the integrity of race and indigeneity served to consolidate a myth of the country’s spatial and temporal distance from the rest of the world. This differentiated it from the more hybrid constructions of Modernism in Europe and the United States, tensions that are played out in the writings of D.H. Lawrence and in European Surrealist writing about Australia.

This afterword discusses some of the social issues that became Jack London's unfinished business because of his death. London supported the nationwide ban on alcoholic beverages, which could be traced to his autobiography of 1913, John Barleycorn, in which he exposed the evils of alcoholism. Other unfinished business includes the chronic labor disputes, the warfare of nations, “oligarchy” and “barbarism,” and corporate Big Business. This afterword also considers Progressive and socialist plans that were swirling in the 1910s, such as the work-related pension for retirees and financial support for orphans and the disabled. Finally, it analyzes “Goliah,” a short story by London that tackled social reform. London died on the night of November 22, 1916 at the age of forty. His ashes were interred, as he wished, beneath a volcanic boulder on his Beauty Ranch property, now the Jack London California State Park.

This chapter focuses on the role played by literature in the widespread adoption of the European model of overseas imperialism, one of the more prominent and controversial processes of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, it examines the history of America's overseas expansion, with particular reference to its unique relationship with Japan. It also analyzes Jack London's Russo-Japanese War correspondence and Lafcadio Hearn's non-fiction books about Japan to highlight an example of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “alternative modernities”—the existence of modernized but non-westernized societies. Finally, it explains the relationship between “racialism” and “alternative modernities”.

Two years after enlisting Hughes Massie as his agent, Jack London had reason to be content. Massie was a sharp operator and managed to avoid the pitfalls of both Alexander Watt and James Pinker. He knew that London demanded quick results, maximum publicity, and regular updates on progress. Massie identified two publishers, George Newnes and Mills & Boon, who were willing to showcase London and, more importantly, provide lucrative contracts and revenues for his new titles as well as his old ones. By January 1914, London had two big new books about to debut: The Valley of the Moon and John Barleycorn, which was already a sensation in America. He was riding high. Yet, few could predict the disaster that would befall Europe by mid-year, upsetting conditions across the Atlantic and throughout the world, nor London’s shocking death in 1916, at just forty years old.

This chapter focuses on the sexual history of “the beast” in relation to human and nonhuman animals in the work of Jack London. Bringing together the work of theorists and historians such as Eve Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, and George Chauncey, the chapter illustrates how attention to the discourse of the jungle unsettles influential readings of The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904). While London might generally be seen as epitomizing the Darwinist-Freudian discourse of the jungle, erotic fireworks between species and between men in his work represent formulations of queer desire that illustrate alternative ways of thinking about animality. Many theorists continue to reinforce a construction of the beast or animality in general as inherently heterosexual, despite recent work by Chauncey, for example, that has uncovered queer human males self-identified as "wolves" at the turn of the century. The chapter concludes by considering alternative possibilities for thinking about pleasure between species, inspired by the work of London.

Life never moved at a slow pace for Jack London, and by 1903 he would be the toast of America—and much of the world—for his groundbreaking novel, The Call of the Wild. His fascination with the craft of writing and the business of publishing would make him a hands-on author, one intimately involved in his unfolding career and interested in every aspect of it. In these formative years of London’s brief but glorious career, we glimpse his business philosophy as he maneuvered between three publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic. In typical fashion, he would dive in head first, disregard good advice, and eventually come to his senses, as he planted the seeds of international success. His principal influences in these early years were two Englishmen: George Brett, president of Macmillan U.S., and Harry Perry Robinson, managing director of Isbister in England.

Jack London had reason to be happy and proud of himself by 1906. Hailed as the “new Rudyard Kipling,” he had two bestsellers under his belt, The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf, numerous short stories published, and some provocative non-fiction that made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. London’s supreme self-confidence, however, had its drawbacks. Overseas, as London relished taking charge of his business affairs and playing the publishing “game,” he displayed an impatience and an erratic nature that often led to confusion and errors. His next novel, White Fang, was a turning point. London knew the earnings potential of this highly anticipated follow-up to The Call of the Wild, and was receptive to outside offers. He held both Macmillan and Heinemann at bay while he entertained an unexpected overture from a new publisher, Methuen, and his most lucrative contract to date.