Jack London: A Self-Made Literary Man
A Notable Figure of American Letters
Though his prose was not as masterful as Henry James, nor his insight into American life as perceptive as Mark Twain, in his own day Jack London became the foremost literary figure in all of America, or at least one of the top five or six. By the end of his life, his novels had made him wealthy, his work was highly acclaimed in the most important journals and reviews of his time, and he traveled in the elite circles he'd spent his youth dreaming of entering.
Most people have only ever read The Call of the Wild, or possibly White Fang. If they can even name another novel by him, most people would name The Sea Wolf or Martin Eden. These four are his best novels, although I think White Fang is less noteworthy than the other three, and only maintains its reputation by virtue of its little brother status to The Call of the Wild. In addition to these four, I've read The Star Rover and The Valley of the Moon, the latter of which I wrote about in an essay last year. It is too long, and drags at times, but the latter half is decent and I'm a sucker for a classic American dream ending. (His seventh most famous novel is The Iron Heel, which I haven't read.)
The Sea Wolf is, in my opinion, London's greatest novel. I don't really think there is a close second. The Call of the Wild is a fascinating tale of life in the Arctic, and a deep meditation on civilization and barbarism, but The Sea Wolf is a true novel of ideas. Wolf Larsen, the titular antagonist, is one part Captain Ahab and one part Rodion Raskolnikov, a man who has read Nietzsche, and who combines intellectual gifts with political cunning and fearsome physical strength. The story, a wild adventure on the high seas, takes place on a sealing voyage in the Pacific, interspersing philosophical debates with brutal vignettes of club and seal. I don't think it rises to the level of Moby Dick, but there is more depth to it than there is in many better-known works of American literature.
Martin Eden is a fictionalized version of London's autobiography. Many of the details of the story didn't happen to him (although many did), but the arc roughly tracks London's life. Eden is born poor in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, and grows up as a sort of Will Hunting figure – a genius who never had a chance at much of a formal education. Like London, Eden spends much of his youth working long hours at manual labor for low pay in the days before working-hour requirements. And like London, he eventually discovers that he can teach himself subjects nobody around him knows how to teach.
London spent some time as a sailor and he also spent time in the Arctic winter during the Gold Rush. But at 19, he spent months studying for the notoriously rigorous University of California entrance exams. He passed and attended for a semester, but dropped out for financial reasons (like Edgar Allen Poe, the most famous dropout from my alma mater).
Where Eden's story tracks most closely with London's is in Eden's self-made literary career. Like London, Eden uses public libraries to teach himself everything he can on science, history, philosophy, and writing. He spends his days breaking his back and his nights reading and sleeping only a few hours a night. Later, he turns to writing and spends years in desperate poverty, writing as much as he can (fiction and nonfiction) and submitting to journals, magazines, publishers, etc. He suffers hundreds or thousands of rejections, until he finally breaks through.
When he does break through, Eden is struck that the same journals which rejected him before he had a reputation now take anything he gives them (even work they rejected in the past). He grows more jaded as (somewhat like Will Hunting) he is constantly surrounded by people with whom he struggles to relate because they can't keep up with his intellect.1 He finds that every time he ascends to a higher social circle, where he imagines he will finally stumble the thing he has been looking for his whole life, he finds it empty. He loses his working-class friends and he loses his bourgeois love interest. In the end, Eden's early death by suicide at the height of his fame, wealth, and literary acclaim prefigures London's own death by alcoholism in his early forties.