hough he was accident-prone throughout his life, repeatedly getting kicked by horses or thrown from them, and one time nearly drowning after falling off an Oakland wharf while drunk, London struggled to maintain a Californian's dream of physical prowess, lordly physique, and eternal youth.
London had little formal education. He never graduated from high school and spent only one term as a special student at the University of California. However, he read widely. He was proud of his working-class background, and he also saw himself as a product of the streets and of a milieu representing the worst of life among cutthroats, and thieves. He as influenced by a number of writers, including Spencer, Marx, Darwin, Mill, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Kipling, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, and Bret Harte:
London was influenced by all of these writers and by hundreds of others but he was never entirely dominated by any of them. There was too much of the intellectual hobo in London for that. He roamed far and wide for his ideas, and he took handouts where he could get them; but he knew that if he were to travel fast and sure he would have to discard all but the stuff that would actually work when he wanted it to. what resulted was a kind of fiction that is not so much stripped down as it is tightly packed with a few good ideas, drawn sometimes from the most unlikely sources and embedded in a situation or event London understood firsthand.
California was London place of birth, his home, and a touchstone to which he would return again and again. Yet California figures only peripherally in his fiction, usually as the place where the story begins before leading elsewhere. He knew the San Francisco dockyards well, and that would be the beginning place for The Sea-Wolf, though the story itself takes place far away at sea. He knew the mining camps of California, and he transferred many of them in terms of attitude and social structure...