t 7:45 on Wednesday morning, November 22, 1916, Sekine, London's Japanese houseboy, brought Jack's accustomed cup of coffee and tried to awaken the author, who lay in a fetal position on a couch in his workroom. When he failed to get a response, Sekine roused Eliza Shepard at her nearby house and the two awakened Charmian. After holding Jack upright and trying to pour black coffee into his mouth, Charmian dispatched Jack Byrne, London's secretary, to Santa Rosa to fetch Dr. Allen M. Thompson, nearest of the family's physicians. The doctor arrived quickly and later said he found Jack doubled up in bed, propped on pillow, head thrown forward, his face a ghastly bluish black.

Thompson, who immediately diagnosed a narcotic overdose, summoned a colleague, Dr. W.B. Hayes of Sonoma, and asked him to bring a stomach pump and an antidote for morphine poisoning.

Soon, the two physicians were attempting to revive their patient with artificial respiration, a stomach lavage of potassium permanganate in solution, vigorous massage of arms and legs, and attempts to walk London around while Charmian and others shouted "Wake up! Wake up!" in his ear. He was also given an injection of atropine sulphate, a central nervous system stimulant.

By mid-day, Dr. William S. Porter, Jack's personal physician, arrived from Oakland together with another medical doctor, a London friend from San Francisco, J. Wilson Shiels. Now four doctors were trying to revive the comatose patient, continuing to walk the rag-doll-limp author around the room, inventing crises—"The dam has burst!"—to shout at him, massaging his limbs and checking his respirations, pupils of his eyes, and reflexes. Once or twice London seemed to respond languidly but only for seconds.

At 7:45 p.m., twelve hours after Sekine found him unconscious, Jack London died at the age of forty years, ten months and six days. [1]

Dr. Porter did not agree with Thompson's diagnosis that the coma had been induced by an overdose of morphine. Porter had been treating Jack for three years for uremia and kidney disease and said it was possible that Jack had taken extra morphine in the throes of renal colic—the agony, the most excruciating pain known to inflict a human, of passing renal calculi, kidney stones. But, Porter said, the coma was the product of retention of bodily poisons London's diseased kidneys could no longer release and not the result of morphine poisoning.

Dr. Thompson was persuaded, if only temporarily, by the argument and signed the joint press release with the other physicians:

At 6:30 p.m., November 21, 1916, Jack London partook of his dinner. He was taken during the night with what was supposed to be an acute attack of indigestion. This, however, proved to be a gastro-intestinal type of uremia. He lapsed into coma and died at 7:45 p.m., November 22.

On the death certificate, Porter wrote that death occurred from "Uremia following renal colic" and a kidney specialist writing in the San Francisco Examiner on December 14, 1916, agreed with the diagnosis. A Dr. William Brady, writing of "The Mysterious Disease that Killed Jack London" gave as common warning signals of uremia as headaches which can persist for days or weeks without relief, unusual daytime drowsiness but night insomnia, shortness of breath on moderate exertion, nausea and vomiting, the sudden onset of watery diarrhea, a peculiar odor resembling ammonia on the breath and skin. Brady said uremia was often mistaken as dyspepsia, asthma, and even drunkenness.

Virtually all the symptoms were recognizable in London's decline and death.

For twenty years the idea that Jack London may have killed himself remained speculative among a handful of the author's friends. The poet George Sterling, chief proponent of the idea, had for more than a decade been London's closest friend and confidante and the virtues of suicide had been among their philosophical musings. Sterling was convinced his friend knew precisely what he was doing in taking an overdose of morphine but the poet's views were tainted by his own self-destructive inclinations. For years he carried a vial of cyanide in his pocket and in 1926, at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, the man who called Jack London "Wolf" (and gave Wolf House its name), swallowed the poison and died.

Within five years of Jack's death, two biographies appeared. Life and Jack London by Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House of the Prairie books), was serialized in Sunset: The Pacific Monthly in 1917-1918, and in 1921 The Century Company published Charmian Kittredge London's The Book of Jack London. Lane's book was highly fictionalized and Charmian's two-volume memoir, while valuable, seemed an overly worshipful work by a widow who saw no faults in her hero. Neither book added details to the circumstances of London's death.

The London-as-suicide theory arrived full force in 1938 with publication of Sailor on Horseback by Irving Stone, a thirty-four year-old former political science professor whose 1934 novel about Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life, launched his literary career. He subtitled his book The Biography of Jack London, not "A Biography" but "The Biography," and he seemed to know all the Jack London secrets.

Sailor on Horseback was a massively flawed book, a light year from the publisher's claim that it was "The definitive biography." The author depended too much on London's fiction, in particular the half-factual novel John Barleycorn and such "work-beast" stories as "The Apostate," to recreate the author's life. And, while Stone the novelist could not escape novelizing Sailor on Horseback (later editions were more factually subtitled "A Biographical Novel"), Sailor was nonetheless a pioneering work, presenting original research on the circumstances of both London's birth and his death.

Stone's research identified for the first time the vagabond astrologer William Henry Chaney as the author's father and printed the 1897 exchange of letters between the two in which Chaney admitted living with Jack's mother, Flora Wellman, at the time of conception but denied paternity: "I was impotent at that time," he said, "the result of hardship, privation, and too much brain work. Therefore I cannot be your father, nor am I sure who your father is." Every London biographer since 1938 (including the author's daughter Joan who researched Chaney's life) has followed Stone's lead and despite his denial, Chaney has been named by all as Jack's "putative father."[2]

The second of the revelations in Sailor on Horseback was the story that London had calculated a lethal dose of morphine and killed himself with it some time during the night of November 21-22, 1916.

Irving Stone's sole source behind this stunning finding was the first physician to reach London's bedside on the morning of November 22nd. In 1936, the author discovered Allen M. Thompson still residing in Santa Rosa, twenty years after he rode down to the Beauty Ranch the fateful morning. The doctor had a clear recollection of what he saw and what he diagnosed. He told Stone that when he arrived at the London cottage he found the author doubled up in bed, unconscious, breathing stertorously, his face bluish black. Thompson said that a morphine sulphate vial and another of atropine sulphate was found on the floor near London's bed and that on the nightstand lay a pad with some figures on it representing a calculation of a lethal dose of 12-1/2 grains of morphine.

"If he had taken 12-1/2 grains early in the evening, he would have been dead," the doctor stated somewhat obscurely. "If he had been accustomed to morphine, had a tolerance for it, he might have lasted; but if he had not been taking it, he wouldn't have lasted more than four hours."

Moreover, Thompson said that later in the day as he and the others continued their efforts to revive London, Charmian told him "it was important that the now probable death of Jack London should not be ascribed to anything but uremic poisoning." Thompson said he told her that "it would be difficult to ascribe it [London's death] to that alone, as any of the telephone conversations overhead that morning, or any information supplied by the druggist who prepared the antidote, would tend to ascribe his death to morphine poisoning." Thompson went on to say that the two physicians who superseded him (William S. Porter and J. Wilson Shiels) concocted the cause of death to avoid an inquest and autopsy. He continued to maintain that a calculated overdose of morphine and atropine had allowed deadly toxins to build in Jack's system resulting in coma and death.

But there were grave problems with Thompson's story that Irving Stone either did not explore or chose not to report.

Neither Eliza Shepard, who was at Jack's bedside the entire day of his death, nor the houseboy Sekine, nor the other doctors in attendance, nor anybody else, ever saw the empty vials or the note pad Thompson cited as evidence of a purposeful drug overdose. Further, the suicide skeptics point out, how could anybody assert that London "calculated a lethal dose" of the drugs without knowing how much morphine and atropine sulphates were in those elusive vials at the moment he reached for them? He was a veteran morphine user and may have taken the drugs several times after they were purchased. Moreover, as a seasoned morphine user, Jack had built up some tolerance for the drug, and even his regular doctor, Porter, would have had difficulty making such a calculation.

As London biographer Andrew Sinclair put it, "All in all, if Dr. Thompson saw some arithmetic on the night table, it was more likely to refer to 12-1/2 percent royalties than grains of morphine for a fatal dose."

(After Sailor on Horseback appeared in 1938, Dr. Porter insisted adamantly to Joan London that uremic poisoning was the cause of her father's death, complicated by whatever morphine he ingested, and not vice-versa. Joan London remained suspicious, however, and seemed to side with the Thompson thesis, but without using the word suicide, in her own book, Jack London and His Times, published in 1939.)

"More than likely," wrote London authority Alfred Shivers, a former pharmacist, "London had injected one or more doses of the drugs during a sharp seizure of pain from his kidney stone, and did not give sufficient heed to possible toxicity." Shivers, for his 1969 study of London's death, consulted three medical authorities who agreed there was no mathematically precise method for calculating a lethal dose of morphine.

The cause of Jack London's death has never been in serious question: He died of kidney failure complicated by a toxic dose or doses of morphine, most likely taken in the throes of pain resulting from kidney stones. The question has always been whether he premeditated his death—knowingly killed himself.