Catherine Murray
Research Paper
Jack London Jack London was a great American writer, author, and journalist in the nineteenth century. He was born John Griffith Chaney, in San Francisco, California. London worked in the Klondike for a few years and then began to write and publish books and stories. His books became very successful which made him one of the most popular authors of the nineteenth century. Jack grew up in a hard working-class. He pretty much paved out the way for his own life and success. He rode trains, worked on oyster ships, shoveled coal, and found employment in a cannery. These experiments inspired him in writing some of his stories, as he really enjoyed to read and write at libraries in his free time. His writing career basically began in 1893, the year that he went out on a sealing voyage in which him and his crew almost got taken out by a typhoon. Jack London’s writing career started off by his mother encouraging him to submit one of his stories to one of the local newspapers for a writing contest. Jack was 17 at the time and even though he only had an eighth grade education, he had won the first prize of twenty-five dollars, and had beat college students from Stanford and Berkley. After this experience, he decided that he would begin to dedicate his life to writing short stories, but he had a difficult time finding publishers. He then enrolled at the University of California Berkeley, but only for a brief time before he traveled north to Canada to try and find at least a small fortune of gold in the Yukon Gold Rush. After returning to California, Jack was still determined to be a successful writer. His experience in the Yukon had convinced him that he had stories he could tell. It had inspired him to later on, write stories such as The Call of the Wild and White Fang. In 1899, he began to write stories in the Californian magazine, the Overland Monthly. London had greatly appreciated getting published and it greatly disciplined him as a writer. From then on, London decided to write at least over one thousand words a day. In 1903, when Jack London was twenty-seven years old, he published his novel, The Call of the Wild, which told the story of a dog in the Yukon who becomes a sled dog. Even though he had great success with this novel, it did not cause him to slow down in his writing career one bit. Over the last 16 years of his life he published over 50 books. Some of these books included, The People of the Abyss which gave his opinion on capitalism and an interesting critique on it as well; White Fang his popular tale about wild wolf that became a domesticated one; and Jack Barleycorn, which was a memoir that detailed his lifelong battle with alcohol and being an alcoholic. Some of London’s other accomplishments included him covering the Japanese War in 1904 for the Hearst papers, introducing Americans to Hawaii, and frequently lecturing about the problems associated with capitalism. In his finals years, Jack was married twice and had two kids. For most of the last ten years of his life, Jack faced many health issues. He had a kidney disease which ended up taking his life. Jack London passed away in California on November 22, 1916.