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Jack London

Jack London was a writer best-known for his adventure stories, many of them set in the wilds of the cold North or at sea. He also wrote newspaper articles, science fiction, and other generic works. London was a California writer who often included certain information about the state or his own attitudes toward the state in his fiction, and what he wrote said much about the nature of California and the entire West Coast in his day, though often transferred to more wilderness regions of the nation.

John London was born in 1876 in San Francisco. The family lived on several farms and ranches in California, and London completed grammar school in 1891 in Oakland. He worked in a cannery for a time, and he later worked with the California Fish Patrol. In 1893 he took a seven-month voyage on the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland, and when he returned he won first prize in a contest for writing the best descriptive article in the San Francisco Morning Call for his "Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan." He finished his high school education in Oakland once more in 1895, and while there he wrote for the student magazine, The High School Aegis.

London had a particular image which he nurtured, and it is generally accepted that the image was more than that--it was a reality:

Adventurer, revolutionist, voice of the proletariat, a writer of he-man fiction, a true hero. . . an expert on boxing, sailing, bicycling, fishing, and duck hunting--this is the image his readers demanded, and in a sense he was all it represented. . . London achieved something of the status of a folk hero in his own time, and he has pretty much remained an emblematic figure ever since.

London maintained this reality and this image in the face of considerable difficulty, including his own tendency to have accidents and injuries, and it is implied that he gained his sense of strength and power in part from a prevailing California attitude:

Even t...

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Jack London. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693311.html