IT began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen. Between swims it was our wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the warm air and soak in the sunshine. Roscoe was a yachtsman. I had followed the sea a bit. It was inevitable that we should talk about boats. We talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small boats. We instanced Captain Slocum and his three years’ voyage around the world in the Spray. We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small boat, say forty feet long. We asserted furthermore that we would like to do it. We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world we’d like better than a chance to do it. “Let us do it,” we said . . . in fun. Then I asked Charmian privily if she’d really care to do it, and she said that it was too good to be true. The next time we breathed our skins in the sand by the swimming pool I said to Roscoe, “Let us do it.” I was in earnest, and so was he, for he said: “When shall we start?”
In April 1907 Jack London set out to sail around the world in the 45-foot ship The Snark, accompanied by his wife and a small crew. Although suffering from seasickness and tropical disease, London wrote prolifically, including a series of entertaining sketches of the voyage itself. These were later collected as The Cruise of the Snark, a remarkable record of adventure and love among the islands of the South Pacific. - Publisher.
The Cruise of the Snark is a non-fictional, illustrated book by Jack London chronicling his sailing adventure in 1907 across the south Pacific in his ketch the Snark. Accompanying London on this voyage was his wife Charmian London and a small crew.A history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. Urban historian Robert Fogelson gives an account of how downtown - and the way Americans thought about it - changed between 1880 and 1950. Recreating battles over subways and skyscrapers, the introduction of elevated highways and parking bans, and other controversies, this work offers a perspective on downtown's rise and fall.
The first book-length study of London as a maritime writer Jack London’s fiction has been studied previously for its thematic connections to the ocean, but Jack London and the Sea marks the first time that his life as a writer has been considered extensively in relationship to his own sailing history and interests. In this new study, Anita Duneer claims a central place for London in the maritime literary tradition, arguing that for him romance and nostalgia for the Age of Sail work with and against the portrayal of a gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in urban or rural settings. The sea provides a dynamic setting for London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity: race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the maritime tradition spills over into texts that are not set at sea. Jack London and the Sea does not address all of London’s sea stories, but rather identifies key maritime motifs that influenced his creative process. Duneer’s critical methodology employs techniques of literary and cultural analysis, drawing on extensive archival research from a wealth of previously unpublished biographical materials and other sources. Duneer explores London’s immersion in the lore and literature of the sea, revealing the extent to which his writing is informed by travel narratives, sensational sea yarns, and the history of exploration, as well as firsthand experiences as a sailor in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. Organized thematically, chapters address topics that interested London: labor abuses on “Hell-ships” and copra plantations, predatory and survival cannibalism, strong seafaring women, and environmental issues and property rights from San Francisco oyster beds to pearl diving in the Paumotos. Through its examination of the intersections of race, class, and gender in London’s writing, Jack London and the Sea plumbs the often-troubled waters of his representations of the racial Other and positions of capitalist and colonial privilege. We can see the manifestation of these socioeconomic hierarchies in London’s depiction of imperialist exploitation of labor and the environment, inequities that continue to reverberate in our current age of global capitalism.
"Jack London's Tales of Cannibals and Headhunters" is set in the romantic and dangerous South Seas and illustrated with the original artwork and several maps.
Raised in poverty as an illegitimate child, Jack London dropped out of school to support his mother, working in mind-deadening jobs that would foster a lifelong interest in socialism. Brilliant and self-taught, he haunted California's waterside bars, brawling with drunken sailors and learning about love from prostitutes. His lust for adventure took him from the beaches of Hawaii to the gold fields of Alaska, where he experienced firsthand the struggles for survival he would later immortalize in classics like White Fang and The Call of the Wild. A hard-drinking womanizer with children to support, Jack London was no stranger to passion when he met and married Charmian Kittredge, the love of his life. Despite his adventurous past, London had never before met a woman like Charmian; she adored fornication and boxing, and willingly risked life and limb to sail and explore. She typed his manuscripts while he churned out novels, serving as his inspiration and his critic. Lover, fighter, and onetime hobo, Jack London lived large and died before he was forty. This is a rare biography, from bestselling historian Alex Kershaw, that proves the truth can be more fascinating--and a far greater adventure--than a fiction.
In April 1907 Jack London set out to sail around the world in the 45-foot ship The Snark, accompanied by his wife and a small crew. Although suffering from seasickness and tropical disease, London wrote prolifically, including a series of entertaining sketches of the voyage itself. These were later collected as The Cruise of the Snark, a remarkable record of adventure and love among the islands of the South Pacific. - Publisher.
