London, Jack

LONDON, JACK (1876-1916). Throughout his life, he was both an individualist and a collectivist. London kept hidden from the public the circumstances of his birth out of wedlock—born to Flora Wellman, a spiritualist, and her common-law husband, William Henry Chaney, who abandoned her and their unborn child. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the domestic drama in the Wellman/Chaney household on June 4, 1875, under the headline “A Discarded Wife.” After a failed attempt at suicide and the intervention of a doctor, Wellman named her son John Griffith Chaney.

The mother placed her child in the care of Virginia Prentice, an African-American ex-slave who nursed him and raised him, and later loaned him money to buy a boat he called The Razzle Dazzle which he sailed across San Francisco Bay and that gave him a taste for the sea. Wellman changed the boy’s name from John Griffith Chaney to John London after she married a Civil War veteran of that name. He called himself “Jack” as a kind of declaration of independence from his parents and stuck with it his whole life. His mother, Flora, never revealed to her son the true story of his origins. Not until adulthood did he read the June 1875 story in The Chronicle, and begin to learn the facts surrounding his birth on January 12, 1876. Chaney denied paternity and begged Jack to leave him alone.

In despair over the rejection by Chaney, London set out for the Yukon to pan for gold and to find himself. He continued his adventures as a hobo and recreated himself on an epic 1894 cross-continental journey that woke him from what he called “bourgeois ethics” and liberated him from his existence as a “wage slave.” In the essay, “How I Became a Socialist,” a classic of twentieth-century left-wing literature, he explains that he was “reborn” on the road that took him across the country, then in the midst of an economic depression that made him anxious about his own survival.
London’s 1894 journey began when he departed from Oakland, California, where he grew into early manhood, just days after the official send-off for the “Industrial Army,” led by Charles T. Kelly that set out for the nation’s capitol. London hoped to catch up and to join Kelly, who linked forces with Jacob S. Coxey, and who planned to descend on Washington, D.C. together. London never reached the capitol, though he traveled, often alone, for thousands of miles on foot, horseback and by railroad. It wasn’t until the Industrial Army was halfway across the country that London finally affiliated with it, albeit briefly. Given his fierce “individualism,” as he called it, he clashed with Charles Kelly who accused him of insubordination. Before he set out for the East on his own, London traveled down the Mississippi—he had read and admired Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn— with Kelly’s second-in-command, George Speed, a veteran organizer. Speed observed that Jack “was never in the army or of it,” a phrase that’s applicable to other groups and organizations, including the Socialist Party, that he joined but without full, total participation.

London’s 1894 cross-continental journey taught him how to become a storyteller in order to survive adversity. It also initiated him into the world of poverty, homelessness, domestic violence, and injustice, as well as working-class solidarity. In Chicago, six weeks after he left Oakland, he gathered mail and money from his mother, bought new clothes, paid for a shave and a meal, went to the theater, and, as a tourist, spent a day on the grounds of the 1893 World Fair.

In Buffalo, New York, near the end of his outward bound journey, he was arrested as a vagrant and sentenced to 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary, a harrowing experience he describes in his memoir, The Road (1907), and that also helped him write his prison novel, The Star Rover (1915). After he returned to Oakland, he became a member of the Socialist Labor Party and later joined the Socialist Party America.

As a teenager, he entered a writing contest and won first prize for a story based on his adventures as a sailor aboard a schooner that also provided material for The Sea-Wolf (1903), a cross between Moby Dick and Captain’s Courageous, with Nietzsche thrown in for intellectual heft.

After one semester at the University of California at Berkeley, he left dissatisfied with academic life and found more mental stimulation when he trekked to the Yukon to work, returning a year later sick and nearly penniless. Still, he had a treasure trove of materials he poured into short stories that earned him the epithet “the Kipling of the North,” even as he became famous as the “Boy Socialist” arrested for speaking in public in Oakland and later ran for mayor as a radical. Curiously, he rarely attended meetings of the Socialist Party. He was too busy writing—often more than 1,000 words a day— speaking and traveling, he explained, though he spoke on the subject of socialism and capitalism and published dozens of political essays and stories, like “The Tramp,” and “The Dream of Debs,” in radical magazines like “Comrade.” With the muckraker, Upton Sinclair, and others, he founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS),), a forerunner of SDS, served as ISS’s first president and wrote a preface for Sinclair’s novel The Jungle that helped make it a best seller.

In 1904 he covered the Russian-Japanese War for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, battled Japanese military censorship and was shocked that an Asian nation could defeat a European power. From then on, he saw Japan and China as a threat to American might, and expressed his views in essays such as “The Yellow Peril.” Near the peak of the British Empire, he saw first hand the poverty in the slums of London, England, and described his experiences as an undercover reporter in The People of the Abyss, a forerunner of the New Journalism of the 1960s.

In 1905, he delivered, a fiery speech titled “Revolution,” in which he lauded the Russian Revolution of that year and endorsed revolutionary violence, including assassinations, which prompted some newspaper editors to call for his deportation. London addressed audience members as “Dear Comrades” and signed off, “Your for the revolution.” Two years after his “Revolution” speech, he published The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel about the coming of a dictatorship to the U.S. that has been as popular around the world as his “dog stories,” such as The Call of the Wild, which has been read as a parable about the survival of the fittest, and the ability of heroic figures to overcome adversity. If London wasn’t entirely in and of the American Left—he had too many contradictions to deserve that epithet—he helped to Americanize socialism and make it attractive to workers who didn’t speak German and were unfamiliar with the European socialist tradition. Emma Goldman called him “the only revolutionary writer in America,” though she never converted him to her brand of anarchism.
In 1913, “Wolf House,” a mansion fit for a millionaire, which he designed, burned to the ground and left him in a state of depression that plagued him until his death in November 1916, shortly before the U.S. entered World War I on the side of the British, a military alliance he had long advocated.

At the end of his life, he discovered the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and ignored his early readings in Marx and the social Darwinians that turned him into both a radical and a racist. From the time of the Spanish-America War until 1916, when he resigned from the Socialist Party, he flirted with white supremacy and endorsed colonialism. (See the essay “The Salt of the Earth.”)

Never monogamous, London married twice: to Elizabeth Maddern, the mother of his two daughters, Joan and Becky; and to Charmian Kittredge, who lived with him at Beauty Ranch in northern California where he aimed to create a communal society close to the land, that was never realized. London enjoyed a loving relationship with Anna Strunsky, a Russian-born Jewish socialist, who tried to make him aware of his racism and sexism, which mar The Valley of the Moon, a pioneering work of California fiction.

Scholars have often placed London in the school of literary “naturalism,” though all of his 50 books can’t be rightfully placed under that rubric. Still, like Emile Zola and Frank Norris, he emphasized the almighty power of the environment to shape individual lives. Both an optimist and a pessimist, he wrote two opposite endings for his best-known short story, “To Build a Fire,” which reflects a divided self that was drawn to hope and despair, and to both American success and the creation of an international, working class conscientiousness.

Boylan, James. Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Labor, Earle, et all, eds. The Letters of Jack London. Three volumes.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press 1988.

London, Charmian. The Book of Jack London. Two volumes. New York:
Century, 1921

London, Joan. Jack London and his Times. New York: Doubleday, 1939.

Raskin, Jonah. ed. The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and
Revolution. Berkeley, Calif. University of California Press, 2008.