Jack London Selected Works [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all. . . . Jack London AND Jack London lived life to its fullest! By 1916, when he died at the relatively early age of forty, London had lived more strenuously and had done more things than many vfcfho live twice as long. It was with the credo "Do or die" that he plunged wholeheartedly into all that life had to offer. Alfred Kazin spoke for many critics when he said that the greatest story London ever wrote was the story he lived. Jack London was an oyster pirate and then a government patrolman in San Francisco Bay, a sailor and an agrarian reformer, a seal hunter in the North Pacific and a gold prospector in the frozen Klondike, a war correspondent and a prizefight reporter, a socialist soapbox orator who later became a lecturer at universities, a family man and landowner, a tramp who rode the rails, and an irrepressible free spirit. Yet, this does not even come close to a complete accounting. From an impoverished childhood and an adolescence filled with hardships reminiscent of those inflicted on the characters in Dickens's novels, London grew to become America's most popular and highly paid author. And not only in America but throughout the world he was read and loved. He was almost totally self-taught and self-disciplined: he was a voracious reader of everything from classical literature to science, and from 1898—when he returned to California from a fateful trip to the Klondike—to the end of his life, London wrote at least one thousand words a day. Just as richly diversified as his life are his writings. Today most people know London first and foremost as a writer of adventure tales and children's stories, including the most famous dog stories of all time. The Call of the Wild and White Fang (which, however, should not be limited to children). But in addition to those and other adventure stories with an impressive range of geographical settings, he wrote political fables, socioeconomic studies, science fiction and fantasy, exposés on alcoholism and capitalism, socialist polemics, articles on prison and agricultural reform, and more. His writings vary in quality as well, from the cheapest and worst kind of hack pieces to beautifully written, even lyrical works that rank as literary masterpieces, such as The Call of the Wild and parts of The Sea-Wolf, Martin Eden, and The Star Rover, and some of his shorter fiction. Moreover, London sold virtually all that he had written, producing over fifty books in addition to hundreds of other items during the seventeen years he wrote professionally. It would be difficult, nay, impossible, to separate London's literary achievement from his life. Professor Earle Labor attributes London's success as a writer to three factors: poverty — he was determined to rise out of oppressive conditions; wanderlust—it was from his travels, adventures, and experiences in all walks of life that he constructed his stories; and third, "the omnivorous appetite for reading that gave him his philosophical substance and a sense of artistic form."