Jack London

Author and Adventurer

Beginnings

While still in his teens, Jack London was forced to earn money to help support the household. He worked at a series of unskilled laboring jobs but constantly sought a way out of that dead-end life. He tried in vain to escape through a series of adventures, but he also hungered for knowledge.

Once he discovered books, he set out on a path toward knowledge. Rejecting university classes as too slow for his taste and ambition, London dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, and began his life-long course of self-education. He read for hours on end, day and night, and also began to write, spending scarce pennies on the postage to send out dozens of manuscripts to magazines and publishers who routinely replied with rejection letters.

Jack London. "The Run Across," in The Aegis, Oakland High School, December 2, 1895.
RB 201293

As a youth, London sailed the waters of the Bay area, first as an oyster pirate, then as a member of the Fish Patrol, apprehending his former comrades in larceny. In 1893, at the age of 17, he signed on as a seaman with the seal-hunting vessel Sophia Sutherland. The experiences of his seven months at sea taught him much about seamanship and about life.

Returning to Oakland High School, London called upon his sea-going adventures for essays like "The Run Across," written for the school journal. The essay is the work of a novice writer, but it nonetheless shows London's gift for vivid description.

Jack London. John Barleycorn, autograph manuscript.  
JL 839

In his memoir, John Barleycorn, London recounted his discovery of the Oakland Public Library, where he could indulge his passion for reading. A school dropout, he spent the rest of his life educating himself, reading voraciously (usually several books at once), and eagerly seeking out the latest or best in philosophical and scientific thought.

Herbert Spencer. An Autobiography, Volume I, New York, D. Appleton Company, 1904, with annotations by Jack London.
RB 334749

Among the books the young London read were the classics of fiction, but also Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto. It was Herbert Spencer, though, who exerted the strongest influence, in his autobiography and in First Principles and other works.

London embraced Spencer's theory that evolution is the fundamental principle on which all other principles are based.

Jack London. Letter to Mabel Applegarth, February 28, 1899.  
JL 10911

By 1899, as a desperate London awaited word from the Post Office of an appointment as a letter carrier, his writing career suddenly began to flourish. He earned his first money ($40) as a professional author when he sold his story "A Thousand Deaths" to The Black Cat, and the Overland Monthly published his stories "To the Man on Trail" and "The White Silence." He would thereafter live as a full-time, professional writer.

Despite London's insecurity about "The White Silence," voiced at the end of this letter to his girlfriend, the story is one of his most brilliant. George Hamlin Fitch, a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said, "I would rather have written 'The White Silence' than anything that has appeared in fiction in the last ten years."

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