Authors

Though there are complete works of London’s fifty-some books published in several foreign countries, including Japan, the Czech Republic, and France, there is none published in the United States. The rare (and incomplete) Sonoma edition (1928) printed twenty-eight titles in twenty-one volumes; the British Fitzroy Works reprinted twenty titles in the 1960s; and the Bodley Head Jack London half a dozen titles. Fortunately, London’s enduring popularity ensures that his novels, short stories, dramas, and nonfiction are continually reprinted—a phenomenon both at home and abroad, as his millions of hits on Google.com attest. The two most significant current editions of London’s writings for scholars and students are the three-volume Letters of Jack London (1988) and three-volume The Complete Short Stories of Jack London (1993), both edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard, published by Stanford University Press with major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other handy editions of material otherwise difficult to track down are Jack London Reports (essays and newspaper articles), edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard (1970); No Mentor But Myself: Jack London on Writers and Writing, ed. Dale L. Walker and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (1999); Jack London: Novels and Stories : Call of the Wild / White Fang / The Sea-Wolf / Klondike and Other Stories and Jack London : Novels and Social Writings, the Library of America edition (1982), edited by Donald Pizer; and The Portable Jack London, edited by Earle Labor (1994), featuring a splendid introduction. London’s most famous work is represented by several excellent teaching editions, including The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, with an Illustrated Reader’s Companion, ed. Daniel Dyer (1995), and The Call of the Wild by Jack London, ed. Earl J. Wilcox and Elizabeth Wilcox (2003). Philip Foner’s Jack London: American Rebel—A Collection of His Social Writings Together with an Extensive Study of the Man and His Times first appeared in 1947 and was reprinted as The Social Writings of Jack London in 1964. David Mike Hamilton’s “Tools of My Trade”: The Annotated Books in Jack London’s Library (1986) is an outstanding source for London’s thinking and artistic sources. Bibliographical work on London has languished since Joan Sherman’s Jack London: A Reference Guide (1977) and Hensley C. Woodbridge, John London, and George H. Tweney’s Jack London: A Bibliography (1966). The nowdefunct Jack London Newsletter, edited by Woodbridge, and the ongoing magazine The Call from the Jack London Society, now edited by Kenneth K. Brandt, have occasionally published bibliographical updates. London scholars and fans have eagerly awaited acknowledged leading expert Earle Labor’s definitive biography, Jack London: A Life (2008). In the meantime, Russ Kingman’s two volumes, Jack London: A Definitive Chronology (1992) and the biography A Pictorial Life of Jack London (1979) have been sources factually reliable if sometimes presented in a tone overly admiring of London. In his Jack: A Biography of Jack London (1977), Andrew Sinclair followed in the fictionalizing footsteps of Irving Stone in Sailor on Horseback (1938), copying the idea of London as a suicide from Stone’s now-discredited notions about London’s death. One of London’s earliest biographers was his daughter Joan London, in Jack London and His Times (1939; rpt. 1968). Clarice Stasz’s American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London (1988) and Jack London’s Women (2001) explore his relationships with important women in his life. Critical books and collections of essays include Franklin Walker’s Jack London and the Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer (1966; rpt. 2005); James McClintock’s White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories (1975; rpt. 1997 as Jack London’s Strong Truths: A Study of the Short Stories); Jacqueline Tavernier- Courbin, ed., Critical Essays on Jack London (1983); Charles N. Watson Jr.’s The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal (1983); Carolyn Johnston’s Jack London – An American Radical? (1984); Earle Labor and Jeanne Campbell Reesman’s Jack London: Revised Edition (1994) a Twayne volume that expands and updates Labor’s original 1974 study with its effective combination of biography and criticism, is the best introduction to London; Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin’s The Call of the Wild: A Naturalistic Romance (1994); Susan Nuernberg’s collection The Critical Response to Jack London (1995), which challenges the conventional wisdom of American critics by contrasting it to the more favorable evaluation of London internationally; Rereading Jack London, ed. Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (1996); Jonathan Auerbach’s Male Call: Becoming Jack London (1996); Reesman’s Jack London: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998); Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer, ed. Sara S. Hodson and Reesman (2002). International conferences and exhibits, essays in scholarly journals, critical books, reprinted editions, web sites, teaching handbooks, studies of London as a photographer, and many other areas of London’s work continue to appear each year.

Born in San Francisco, London grew up in poverty and worked variously in a cannery, as a seaman, as a jute-mill worker, and as a coal-shoveler in a power plant. He was once arrested in New York for vagrancy and spent thirty days in jail. London, who always loved to read, later enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, but financial difficulties forced him to leave after only one semester. He then joined the Oakland chapter of the Socialist Labor Party, whose working-class principles he embraced along with the Darwinian idea that only the fittest will survive. His most famous novels, The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904), both attest to the law of survival; The People of the Abyss (1903) and War of the Classes (1905) empathize with socialism. An astoundingly prolific writer, producing twenty novels, two hundred stories, and more than four hundred works of nonfiction, London was the first American author to become a millionaire through his writing.