Jack london quotes
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Jack London: His Life and Work
John Griffith Chaney, better known by his pseudonym Jack London, was born on January 12, 1876. He was an American author who wrote fiction and nonfiction books, short stories, poems, plays, and essays. He was a very prolific writer and achieved worldwide literary success prior to his death on November 22, 1916.
Early Years
Jack London was born in San Francisco, California. His mother, Flora Wellman, became pregnant with Jack while living with William Chaney, an attorney and astrologer. Chaney left Wellman and did not play an active role in Jack's life. In the year that Jack was born, Wellman married John London, a Civil War veteran. They stayed in California, but moved to the Bay Area and then to Oakland.
The Londons were a working-class family. Jack completed grade school and then took a series of jobs involving hard labor. By the age of 13, he was working 12 to 18 hours per day in a cannery. Jack also shoveled coal, pirated oysters, and worked aboard a sealing ship. It was aboard this ship that he experienced adventures that inspired som
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Jack London
A Brief Biography
Jack London was born on January 12, 1876. By age 30 London was internationally famous for his books Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904) and other literary and journalistic accomplishments. Though he wrote passionately about the great questions of life and death and the struggle to survive with dignity and integrity, he also sought peace and quiet inspiration. His stories of high adventure were based on his own experiences at sea, in the Yukon Territory, and in the fields and factories of California. His writings appealed to millions worldwide.
London was also widely known for his personal exploits. A colorful, controversial personality, London was often in the news. Generally fun loving, he was quick to side with the underdog against injustice of any kind. An eloquent public speaker, he was much sought after as a lecturer on socialism and other economic and political topics. Most people considered London a living symbol of rugged individualism, a man whose fabulous success was not due to special favor of any kind, but to a combinatio
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London wrote that he witnessed “unprintable” and even “unthinkable” things while in prison. Were any of them sexual? How platonic, for that matter, were his friendships with other sailors, pirates, and hoboes? Labor is noticeably less interested in the question than earlier biographers have been, but the historian George Chauncey has classified sailors, prisoners, and hoboes at the turn of the twentieth century as belonging to a distinctive “erotic system” of underground homosexuality, and London seems to have been aware of it. He dedicated “The Road” (1907), his memoir of this time, to Josiah Flynt, the author of the essay “Homosexuality Among Tramps.” “Every tenth man practices it,” Flynt wrote. A young hobo who offered his sexual favors was known as a “prushun,” a “kid,” or a “lamb”; an older hobo who took advantage was a “wolf” or a “jocker.” Though London was called Sailor Kid and ’Frisco Kid when he first started riding the rails, he insisted that “I was never a prushun, for I did not take kindly to possession”; in 1911, when a bisexual sent him a hint-filled letter, London
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