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Published byAriel Tate Modified over 8 years ago
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Jack London born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916
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Early life. In 1894 he was wagabonding for a while and got to prison for it. He entered main school, but considered the pace of studying there too slow and decided to prepare himself to enter University of California, which he did. Unfortunately he had not enough money to continue his education for more then three terms. Born by Flora Wellman Jack was rejected by his father William Chaney and grew up in the family of John London. Due to the terrible economic crisis in the country Jack started working from lower school as paperboy. Experiencing hardship of working life he was cleaner, oyster pirate, workilng in fishing patrol and washing house.
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Becoming an author. The remarkable thing about Jack London is that he used his life experiences to create his peaces. He concluded that his only hope of escaping the work "trap" was to get an education and "sell his brains”. London began his writing career. After leaving University of California he went to Oakland under the Gold Rush, which was not successful in terms of getting rich. However, London left Oakland with a social conscience and socialist leanings; he returned to become an activist for socialism.
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Becoming famous. n 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, about $71,000 in today's currency. London began his writing career just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. He was a pioneer in the then- burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.
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Marriages. Jack London got married twice. Firt time he married Elizabeth "Bessie" Maddern on April 7, 1900, with whom he had two daughters Becky (left) and Joan (right). For the second time he married Charmian Kittredge in 1905. Their time together included numerous trips, including a 1907 cruise to Hawaii and Australia. Many of London's stories are based on his visits to Hawaii.
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War correspondent. London accepted an assignment of the San Francisco Examiner to cover the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904, arriving in Yokohama on January 25, 1904. Being arrested several times he was released from the last one through the personal intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt, London departed the front on June 1904. Glen Elen Ranch. In 1905, London purchased a 1,000 acres (4.0 km^2) ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California. He desperately wanted the ranch to become a successful business enterprise. However, after 1910, his literary works were mostly potboilers, written out of the need to provide operating income for the ranch. This made him hate his job, so that London was about to stop writing.
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Death. London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. London had been a robust man but had suffered several serious illnesses. At the time of his death, he suffered from dysentery, uremia, and late stage alcoholism; he was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed to his death. The old Winery Cottage, where London died (in the left sleeping porch) on November 22, 1916
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Works. As we know that London enriched his books using personal experience that made stories so interesting and descriptive, here are some of novels and places where material for them was collected: While living at his rented villa on Lake Merritt in Oakland, London met poet George Sterling; in time they became best friends. In 1902, Sterling helped London find a home closer to his own in nearby Piedmont. In his letters London addressed Sterling as "Greek", owing to Sterling's aquiline nose and classical profile, and he signed them as "Wolf". London was later to depict Sterling as Russ Brissenden in his autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1910) and as Mark Hall in The Valley of the Moon (1913). George Sterling, Mary Austin, Jack London, and Jimmie Hooper on the beach at Carmel, California
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Works. On returning to California in 1898, London began working deliberately to get published, a struggle described in his novel, Martin Eden (serialized in 1908, published in 1909). His first published story since high school was "To the Man On Trail", which has frequently been collected in anthologies. When The Overland Monthly offered him only five dollars for it—and was slow paying— 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.
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Works. London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer. "A Piece of Steak" is a tale about a match between older and younger boxers. It contrasts the differing experiences of youth and age but also raises the social question of the treatment of aging workers. "The Mexican" combines boxing with a social theme, as a young Mexican endures an unfair fight and ethnic prejudice in order to earn money with which to aid the revolution.
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Works. The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel that anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.[78] London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here. The Iron Heel meets the contemporary definition of soft science fiction.
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Works. The Call of the Wild is a novel by Jack London published in 1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush—a period in which strong sled dogs were in high demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a domesticated dog living at a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley of California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and sold into service as sled dog in Alaska, he reverts to a wild state. Buck is forced to fight in order to dominate other dogs in a harsh climate. Eventually he sheds the veneer of civilization, relying on primordial instincts and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.
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Works. The Sea-Wolf is a 1904 psychological adventure novel by American novelist Jack London about a literary critic, survivor of an ocean collision, who comes under the dominance of Wolf Larsen, the powerful and amoral sea captain who rescues him. Its first printing of forty thousand copies was immediately sold out before publication on the strength of London's previous The Call of the Wild.
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Works. White Fang is a novel by American author Jack London (1876–1916) — and the name of the book's eponymous character, a wild wolfdog. First serialized in Outing magazine, it was published in 1906. The story takes place in Yukon Territory, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush and details White Fang's journey to domestication. It is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best-known work, The Call of the Wild, which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.
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The End.
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