Jack London in 1905 (Public Domain)
Jack London—“illegitimate, handsome, wildly romantic, casting himself as the rebel and revolutionary” (as the Wall Street Journal described him)—was born 150 years ago, on January 12, 1876. An “instinctive artist of the highest order,” according to H. L. Mencken, London exemplified the literary life on two fronts: not only was he a celebrity author, a member of a radical artistic demimonde that included Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and John Muir, but his brief, incandescent biography possessed a novelistic momentum all its own.
As a teenager, London trawled the Bay Area as an oyster pirate, relieving the senior San Francisco poacher French Frank of his boat and his mistress. That experience would make it into London’s autobiographical novel John Barleycorn. Later, he was arrested for vagrancy and jailed under abominable conditions in Buffalo, NY, a tale London channeled in The Road, his memoir of the hobo culture of the 1890s. Joining the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, at age twenty-one, yielded perhaps the most enduring fiction of London’s career: the bone-chilling tale of wilderness survival “To Build a Fire,” as well as the classic novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang (all gathered in the LOA edition of his Novels and Stories).
Jack London: Novels and Stories
“Expression—with me—is far easier than invention,” London wrote. Deriving his plots from personal experience, newspaper clippings, and sketches purchased from other writers (among them a young Sinclair Lewis), London did not wait for inspiration, but instead went out hunting for it “with a club”: “if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it,” he advised other would-be writers in a 1903 column.
His methods of hunting and poaching occasionally led to accusations of plagiarism, though London always seemed to have a plausible explanation for why his tales sounded familiar. “It is a common practice of authors to draw material for their stories, from the newspapers,” went one defense, published to sweep aside similarities between works by London and Norris released within a month of each other and sourced, apparently, from the same news item about a dog fetching a stick of dynamite.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
“I took the facts of life contained in it, added to them the many other facts of life gained from other sources, and made, or attempted to make, a piece of literature out of them,” London continued, pivoting to a second tale (“Love of Life,” also in the LOA volume) that had come under scrutiny. “This other narrative was a newspaper account of a lost and wandering prospector near Nome, Alaska. On top of this, I drew upon all my own personal experience of hardship and suffering and starvation, and upon the whole fund of knowledge I had of the hardship and suffering and starvation of hundreds and thousands of other men.” Mea culpa, he seems to say, and this is how I did it.
The facts and fabula of a story, to London, were raw ore for the refining process of literature, forged in the mind and experience of the writer and impressed with his unique signature. Far from plagiarism, this was reconstitution, a melting down of narrative material that fed the furnace of his authorial vocation. (Tellingly, he referred to his 15,000-volume personal library as “the tools of my trade.”)
Authors George Sterling and Mary Austin on the beach in Carmel, CA, with London (second from right) and his friend Jimmy Hopper, an Oakland journalist. Photograph by Arnold Genthe. (Public Domain)
These threads come together to what might be London’s defining credo, a 1916 foreshock of the punk-rock truism that it’s better to burn out than fade away.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Explore the novels and stories of London in the LOA series, and find a wide selection of his fiction free to read on our Story of the Week site.
