Jack London was an American author whose The Call of the Wild and White Fang remain the most powerful animal narratives in American literature, and whose political radicalism animated an enormous output across just seventeen years.
Jack London produced fifty books in seventeen years before dying at forty of kidney failure — the compressed output of a writer working at ferocious speed against an awareness of limited time. The Call of the Wild (1903), about a sled dog who reverts to his instinctual wolf nature in the Yukon, and White Fang (1906), its companion novel about a wolf-dog’s opposite journey toward civilization, are his most enduring work: written from within animal consciousness with a vividness that has never been equaled in the genre.
London was a socialist who wrote for socialist publications throughout his life, and the political vision runs through even his adventure fiction. The Sea-Wolf (1904) is a study of a brutal sea captain as a Nietzschean superman. Martin Eden (1909) — his most autobiographical novel — is a bitter critique of the individualism that his own success might have seemed to celebrate. He reported from the Klondike, the Russo-Japanese War, and various conflict zones, and his journalism was read as seriously as his fiction.
His prodigious output includes work of uneven quality — he wrote quickly for money and admitted it — but his best work has outlasted most of his literary contemporaries. The Klondike stories in particular capture the hostile wilderness of the Yukon with an authenticity that came from having been there, prospecting and surviving. The People of the Abyss (1903), his nonfiction account of living among London’s poor, anticipated much of the social journalism that followed.
