London, Jack (John Griffith London)
London, Jack (John Griffith London)( 1876–1916),born in San Francisco, is said to have been the illegitimate son of William Henry Chaney (1821–1903), an itinerant astrologer. Reared by a family without fixed occupation or residence, he lived along the Oakland waterfront described in Martin Eden and John Barleycorn, and attended school only until he finished grammar school at 14. As a boy he bought a sloop and with some cronies raided the oyster beds about the bay, as he later told in The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). He abandoned this lawless, reckless occupation in 1893, to join a sealing cruise which took him as far as Japan. After a tramping trip through the U.S. and Canada, and a period of education including a semester at the University of California (1896), he returned to the Oakland waterfront with an interest in sociology and the Socialist party, which appears in...
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