Jack London - The Call of the Wild, Ebooks (various), E-books
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Open
Purchase the entire
Coradella Collegiate
Bookshelf on CD at
The Call of the Wild.
Purchase the entire Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf on CD at
About the author
Barleycorn
he claims to have stolen French Frank’s mistress Mamie. After a
few months his sloop became damaged beyond repair. He switched to the
side of the law and became a member of the California Fish Patrol.
In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner
Sophia Sutherland
, bound
for the coast of Japan. When he returned, the country was in the grip of the
panic of ‘93 and Oakland was swept by labor unrest. After gruelling jobs in
a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly’s industrial
army and began his career as a tramp.
In 1894, he spent thirty days for vagrancy in the Erie County
Penitentiary at Buffalo. In
The Road
, he wrote:
Jack London, probably born John
Griffith Chaney ( January 12, 1876 -
November 22, 1916), in San
Francisco, was an American author of
over 50 books.
Jack London’s biological father is believed by Clarice Stasz and other
biographers to have been the astrologer William Chaney. Chaney was in
fact a distinguished and respectable figure; according to Stasz, “From the
viewpoint of serious astrologers today, Chaney is a major figure who shifted
the practice from quackery to a more rigorous method.”
Jack London did not learn of Chaney’s putative paternity u
adulthood. In 1897 he wrote to Chaney and received a letter in which
Chaney stated flatly “I was never married to Flora Wellman,” and that he
was “impotent” during the period in which they lived together and “cannot
be your father.”
Whether the marriage was, in fact, legalized is unknown. Most San
Francisco civil records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. (For the
same reason, it is not known with certainty what name appeared on his
birth certificate). Stasz notes that in his memoirs Chaney refers to Jack
London’s mother Flora Wellman, as having been his “wife.” Stasz also notes
an advertisement in which Flora calls herself “Florence Wellman Chaney.”
Jack London was essentially self-taught. In 1883 he found and read
Ouida’s long Victorian novel
Signa
, which describes an unschooled Italian
peasant child who achieves fame as an opera composer. He credited this as
the seed of his literary aspiration.
After graduating from grammar school in 1889, Jack London began
working from twelve to eighteen hours a day at Hickmott’s Cannery. Seeking
a way out of this gruelling labor, he borrowed money from his black foster
mother Jennie Prentiss, bought the sloop
Razzle-Dazzle
from an oyster
pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. In
John
man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable
horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say ‘unprintable’; and in justice I
must also say ‘unthinkable’ They were unthinkable to me until I saw
them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the
awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to
reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and
facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them.
A pivotal event was his discovery in 1895 of the Oakland Public Library
and a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith (who later became California’s
first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary
community).
After many experiences as a hobo, sailor, and member of Kelly’s Army
he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School, where he
contributed a number of articles to the high school’s magazine,
The Aegis
.
Jack London desperately wanted to attend the University of California
and, in 1896 after a summer of intense cramming, did so; but financial
circumstances forced him to leave in 1897 and he never graduated.
Biographer Russ Kingman says that “there is no record that Jack ever wrote
for student publications” there.
In later life Jack London was a polymath with wide-ranging interests
and a personal library of 15,000 volumes.
On July 25, 1897, London sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush where
he would later write his first successful stories. Jack left Oakland a believer
in the work ethic, and returned a socialist. He also concluded that his only
hope of escaping the work trap was to get an education and “sell his brains.”
Throughout his life he saw writing as a business, his ticket out of poverty,
and, he hoped, a means of beating the wealthy at their own game.
On returning to Oakland in 1898, he began struggling seriously to
The Call of the Wild.
Purchase the entire Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf on CD at
break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel,
Martin Eden
.
His first published story was the fine and frequently anthologized “To the
Man On Trail.” When
The Overland Monthly
offered him only $5 for it—
and was slow paying—Jack London came close to abandoning his writing
career. In his words, “literally and literarily I was saved” when
The Black Cat
accepted his story, “A Thousand Deaths,” and paid him $40—the “first
money I ever received for a story.”
Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started
just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of
magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide
public, and a strong market for short fiction. The first issue of
The Atlantic
Monthly
contained Jack London’s story, “An Odyssey of the North.” In
1900, he made $2,500 in writing, the equivalent of about $50,000 today.
His career was well under way.
Jack London was accused of plagiarism numerous times during his
career. He was vulnerable, not only because he was such a conspicuous and
successful writer, but also because of his methods of working. In a letter to
Elwyn Hoffman he wrote “expression, you see—with me—is far easier than
invention.” He purchased plots for stories and novels from the young Sinclair
Lewis. And he used incidents from newspaper clippings as material
which to base stories.
Egerton R. Young claimed that
The Call of the Wild
was taken from his
book
My Dogs in the Northland.
Jack London’s response was to acknowledge
having used it a source; he claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking
him.
In July, 1902, two pieces of fiction appeared within the same month:
Jack London’s “Moon-Face,” in the
San Francisco Argonaut,
and Frank
Norris’s “The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock,” in
Century.
Newspapers
paralleled the stories, which London characterizes as “quite different in
manner of treatment, [but] patently the same in foundation and motive.”
Jack London explained that both writers had based their stories on the
same newspaper account. Subsequently it was discovered that a year earlier,
one Charles Forrest McLean had published another fictional story based
on the same incident!
In 1906 the New York World published “deadly parallel” columns
showing eighteen passages from Jack London’s short story “Love of Life”
side by side with similar passages from a nonfiction article by Augustus
Biddle and J. K Macdonald entitled “Lost in the Land of the Midnight
Sun.” According to Joan London, the parallels “[proved] beyond question
that Jack had merely rewritten the Biddle account.” ( Jack London would
surely have objected to that word “merely.”) Jack London noted that the
World did not accuse him of “plagiarism,” but only of “identity of time and
situation,” to which he defiantly “pled guilty.” London’s acknowledged his
use of Biddle, cited several other sources he had used, and stated that “I, in
the course of making my living by turning journalism into literature, used
material from various sources which had been collected and narrated by
men who made their living by turning the facts of life into journalism.”
The most serious incident involved Chapter 7 of
The Iron Heel,
entitled
“The Bishop’s Vision.” This chapter was almost identical with an ironic
essay Frank Harris had published in 1901, entitled “The Bishop of London
and Public Morality.” Harris was incensed and suggested that he should
receive 1/60th of the royalties from
The Iron Heel,
the disputed material
constituting about that fraction of the whole novel. Jack London insisted
that he had clipped a reprint of the article which had appeared in an
American newspaper, and believed it to be a genuine speech delivered by
the genuine Bishop of London. Joan London characterized this defense as
“lame indeed.”
Jack London was a lifelong socialist. In 1896 the
San Francisco Chronicle
published a story about the 20-year-old London who was out nightly in
Oakland’s City Hall Park, giving speeches on socialism to the crowds—an
activity for which he was arrested in 1897. He ran unsuccessfully as the
Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland in 1905, toured the country
lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published collections of essays on
socialism (
The War of the Classes
, 1905;
Revolution, and other Essays
, 1910).
He customarily closed his letters “Yours for the Revolution.”
A socialist viewpoint is evident throughout his writing, most notably
in his novel
The Iron Heel
. No theorist or intellectual socialist, Jack London’s
socialism came from the heart and from his life experience.
In his later years he possibly felt some ambivalence toward socialism.
He was an extraordinary financial success as a writer, and wanted desperately
to make a financial success of his Glen Ellen ranch. He complained about
the “inefficient Italian workers” in his employ. In 1916 he resigned from
the Glen Ellen chapter of the Socialist Labor Party, but stated emphatically
that he did so “because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis
on the class struggle.”
The Call of the Wild.
Purchase the entire Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf on CD at
Jack London’s death is controversial. Many older sources describe it as
a suicide, and some still do. In his autobiographical novel
Martin Eden
, the
protagonist commits suicide by drowning, a detail which undoubtedly
contributed to the myth.
Jack London’s ashes are buried, together with those of his wife
Charmian, in Jack London State Park, in Glen Ellen, California. The simple
grave is marked only by a mossy boulder.
Contents
Click on a chapter number in the list
above, or, as you are reading, on one of the
numbers at the bottom of the screen to go to
the first page of that chapter.
Note:
The best way to read this ebook is in Full
Screen mode: click View, Full Screen to set
Adobe Acrobat to Full Screen View. This
mode allows you to use Page Down to go to
the next page, and afford the best reading view.
Press Escape to exit the Full Screen View.
The Call of the Wild.
Purchase the entire Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf on CD at
1
The Call
of the Wild.
Chapter 1.
Into the Primitive.
"Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom's chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain."
NOTICE
Copyright © 2004 thewritedirection.net
Please note that although the text of this ebook is in the public domain, this
pdf edition is a copyrighted publication.
FOR COMPLETE DETAILS, SEE
COLLEGEBOOKSHELF.NET/COPYRIGHTS
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known
that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every
tide- water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair,
from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the
Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steam-
ship and transportation companies were booming the find,
thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]