In One Book, Five Novels! The five most well-known and significant novels by Jack London are collected in a single, handy volume: Martin Eden; The Call of the Wild; White Fang; The Sea-Wolf and The Iron Heel. Novelist and social activist John London was an American who lived from 1876 until 1916. He was a pioneer in the field of commercial fiction and one of the first American writers to achieve literary stardom on a global scale. He also made significant contributions to the growth of the science fiction subgenre. He is still regarded as one of the most enduringly well-liked and significant American authors of his time, and both young and elderly readers adore him.
Who was the fascinating man behind the legend? Forget all the rumors. In this book, you can read Jack¿s thoughts and ideas . . . in his own words. More insightful than an autobiography, London¿s words offer a direct glimpse into his life, mind, and spirit. His words reflect his multi-faceted personality¿direct, enthusiastic, intelligent, passionate, and at times, brutally frank. This collection of quotations¿the most comprehensive to date¿from Jack London¿s writings and letters allow us to better understand who he was¿his dreams, his doubts, and frustrations. By publishing these words, Jack London speaks for himself. In this premier edition, the first of its kind, published 85 years after his death, Jack's words speak to us, reaching out across the great "white silence" to enrich the lives of a new generation of readers. This book also contains a Chronology of Jack London¿s life . . . one of the most complete and accurate chronologies in existence!Edited by Margie Wilson, professional editor and writer for more than 30 years. Her honors include inclusion in Who¿s Who in the West, The Dictionary of International Biography, and selection as one of the ¿2000 Outstanding Women of the 20th Century¿ and one of the ¿2000 Outstanding Scholars of the 20th Century¿.
This Library of America volume of Jack London’s best-known work is filled with thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often works itself out through violence. London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time (which included the depressions of the 1890s and the beginnings of World War One), and he remains one of the most widely read of all American writers. The Call of the Wild (1903), perhaps the best novel ever written about animals, traces a dog’s sudden entry into the wild and the education necessary for his survival in the ways of the wolf pack. Like many of London’s stories, this one is inspired by the early deprivations of his own pathetically short life: the primitive conditions of life as an oyster pirate in San Francisco; the restless existence of a hobo; the isolation of a prison inmate; the exertion of a laborer in the Oakland slums; and the frustration of a failed prospector for gold in the Alaskan Klondike. White Fang (1906), in which a wolf-dog becomes domesticated out of love for a man, is apparently the reverse side of the process found in The Call of the Wild, yet for many readers its moments of greatest authenticity are those which suggest that, in actual practice, civilization is pretty much a dog’s life for everyone, of “hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony.” Though London was a reader of Marx and Nietzsche and an avowed socialist, he doubted that socialism could ever be put into practice and was convinced of the necessity for a brutal individualism. He thought of The Sea-Wolf (1904), the story of Wolf Larsen and his crew of outcasts on the lawless Alaskan seas, as “an attack upon the superman philosophy,” but the Captain is far more memorable than any of the book’s civilized characters. London is an immensely exciting writer partly because the conflicts in his thinking tend to enhance rather than hinder the romantic and thrilling turns of his plots. The stories of the Klondike, which are based on his personal experiences and the stories of California, Mexico, and the South Seas, span the whole of London’s career as a writer. He is one of the great storytellers in American literature, and his politics, with all their passion and contradiction, come to life through the vigor and red-blooded energy of his prose. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, 1876 - 1916 was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," and "Love of Life." He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen," and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. In this book: The Call of the Wild White Fang The Sea-Wolf
