Jack London’s works reveal contradictions that characterized his life and art. London (1876–1916), who remains one of the most widely read of American writers, expresses the social, intellectual, and artistic turbulence of the turn of the twentieth century through his competing sympathies with socialism, Darwinism, social Darwinism, and Nietzschean individualism; his startling combinations of urban settings and characters with the pastoral or exotic; and his dual identity as a “literary” writer of the emerging naturalist school and a mass-market phenomenon. Yet none of the author’s “contradictions” is more important to understanding his work than his attitudes about race—and...

It has often been remarked that Jack London was a man who lived different lives as author, adventurer, sailor, sportsman, socialist crusader, rancher, war correspondent, and more. Understanding the role of a feature of his work as significant as his preoccupation with race first requires understanding the multiple contexts in which his thinking and writing on race developed alongside his increasing self-identification as a writer. Racial factors in his early life, in his historical, social, and cultural milieus, and in his reading provide a matrix for critical analysis of his writings. In any given work London’s treatment of race is...

The klondike was London’s first defining frontier of self and vocation. There his Anglo-Saxon identity could be tested in a stark environment in which both “natural” ability and adaptation could play a part. Instead of focusing merely on the theme of survival against the elements, London wrote stories that have much more to do with negotiated survival among racial Others in which innate characteristics can matter less than adaptability and the desire for community. In his Klondike fiction London thus turns to such conflicted racial tropes as the Noble Savage, biracialism and passing, the tragic mulatto, “double-consciousness,” Darwinian competition, and...

At the age of twenty-seven, enjoying worldwide fame as author of The Call of the Wild and having finished The Sea-Wolf (1904), leaving his page proofs in the hands of his old friend George Sterling and his new love Charmian Kittredge, London accepted an offer from the Hearst newspaper syndicate to cover the Russo-Japanese War. In that capacity he could again seek adventure and discover new identities and artistic material. In going to Korea he said he was “expecting to get thrills,” inspired by Stephen Crane’s “descriptions of being under fire in Cuba” and other tales of “correspondents in all...

London and his crew sailed the Londons’ ketch, the Snark, across the Pacific in 1907–09, two years of adventure and arguably the two most important years of London’s artistic production, especially his portrayals of race. The trip occasioned a dramatic change in his racial thinking, as he learned much more about the diverse peoples of the world than his earlier racialist ideas had allowed. Nearly without exception in his Pacific short fiction his racial point of view is not that of the colonizing whites but rather of islanders themselves. From his very first Hawaiian story, “The House of Pride,”...

The morning of July 4, 1910, dawned upon a divided nation. For months, boxing fans, newspapers, magazines, and even preachers had hyped the world heavyweight title boxing match to be held in Reno, Nevada, between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. This Independence Day match between the most famous—and infamous—black boxer of his day and the man whites rallied behind as their “Great White Hope” was nothing less than a “racial Armageddon,” as Randy Roberts, one of Johnson’s biographers, sets the scene.¹ On the day of the fight the liquor flowed and spirits soared. A mob of nearly twenty...

Since its publication a century ago, London’s semiautobiographical Martin Eden (1909) has been translated into dozens of languages, has been read by millions, and has inspired countless writers. Yet it is a mixed achievement. From the month of its publication until London died seven years later, he had to defend or explain it against interpretations he saw as contrary to his purpose, and its meaning has remained a matter of controversy. Even career London scholars confess puzzlement at its philosophical conflicts or find it difficult to teach, either because of its conflict between individualism and socialism or because students are...

On christmas eve 1911, the Londons boarded a Western Pacific train in Oakland for New York City. They arrived January 2, 1912, and London planned meetings with a new publisher, Century. His spat with George Brett at Macmillan, his long-time publisher, would later be resolved, but this sudden change was one warning sign amid many that London’s state of mind and behavior were unstable. In New York he drank heavily and was reportedly out with chorus girls, leaving Charmian to fret at night in their rooms on Morningside Drive:

Almost any passage in our companionship I contemplate with more pleasure...

A passage from charmian’s Log of the Snark speaks to Jack and Charmian London’s continuing quest for many homes:

“We have lived a little, you and I, Mate-Woman,” Jack said this morning, as we took our book under an awning out of the glare. We had been talking over our travel experiences and the people we had met, from Cuba to Molokai, from Paris to the Marquesas. A vivid life it is, and we hold it and cherish it every minute, every hour of to-day, and yesterday, and the fair thought of days that are coming.¹

The Londons continued their...