Jack London

John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was born in San Francisco in 1876. London grew up working-class. He carved out his own hardscrabble life as a teen. He rode trains, pirated oysters, shoveled coal, worked on a sealing ship on the Pacific and found employment in a cannery. In his free time he hunkered down at libraries, soaking up novels and travel books.

His life as a writer began in 1893. That year he had weathered a harrowing sealing voyage, one in which a typhoon had nearly taken out London and his crew. The 17-year-old adventurer had made it home and regaled his mother with his tales of what had happened to him. When she saw an announcement in one of the local papers for a writing contest, she pushed her son to write down and submit his story.

Armed with just an eighth-grade education, London captured the $25 first prize, beating out college students from Berkeley and Stanford.

For London, the contest was an eye-opening experience, and he decided to dedicate his life to writing short stories. He briefly enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, before heading north to Canada to seek at least a small fortune in the gold rush happening in the Yukon.

After working in the Klondike, Jack London returned home and began publishing stories. He found fame and some fortune at the age of 27 with his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), which told the story of a dog that finds its place in the world as a sled dog in the Yukon. Two other novels, White Fang and Martin Eden, placed him among the most popular American authors of his time.

Commissioned by Margaret & Rolf Hougen, O. C.