Jack london 2
Jack london 2Jack London was born John Griffiths Chaney and changed his name for unknown reasons. He was born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco. His mother, Flora Wellman, was unmarried and of wealthy background. His father may have been William Chaney. Chaney was a journalist, lawyer, and a major figure in the development of American astrology. During his childhood his parents weren't there for him and he was looked after by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss (Memmie Jennie). London dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, and worked at a series of low-paying sweatshops until he was sixteen.
In 1894, during America's worst depression of his time, London traveled across the United States and Canada on railroads. He was arrested in 1894 in Niagara Falls and jailed for vagrancy. As an adolescent, he worked at various hard labor jobs, pirated for oysters, served as a fish patrol to capture poachers, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, joined Kelly's Army of unemployed working men, and returned to attend high school. University of California at Berkeley, is where London went when he went back.
Jack started to become a writer to escape from the horrific prospects of life as a factory worker. He studied other writers and began to submit stories, jokes, and poems to various publications, mostly without success. These writers he studied were Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Jung.
London went to the Klondike for hopes of digging up gold in 1897. The attempt to find gold was unsuccessful. The winter of 1897 provided the metaphorical gold for his first stories. From that point he was a highly disciplined writer, who wrote over fifty volumes of stories, novels, and political essays. London also spent the winter suffering from scurvy, and later returned to San Francisco in the spring. In 1899 London was starting to make headway in the publishing world, despite more than 250 rejections a year.
London was married to Bess Maddern in 1900, with whom he had two daughters, Joan and Bess. With her as his inspiration, he followed the precept in a book be CO-wrote with Anna Strunsky, The Kempton-Wace Letters. London divorced Bess due to an affair with his "New Woman," Charmian Kittredge. In 1905 he married Charmian, who became the persona for many of his female characters and who avidly joined him on his many travel ventures. He encouraged her to a writings career, and she wrote three books concerning their life: The Log of the Snark, Our Hawaii, and The Book of Jack London.
London went to England in 1902, where he studied the backside of the British imperium. He wrote a report of his findings about the economic degration of the poor (The People of the Abyss), and was a success in the U.S. He traveled...
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