London, Jack (John) Griffith
London, Jack (John) Griffith ( 1876 – 1916 ),American novelist, born in San Francisco, the son of an itinerant astrologer and a spiritualist mother; he took the name of his stepfather John London . He grew up in poverty, scratching a living in various legal and illegal ways—robbing the oyster beds, working in a canning factory and a jute mill, serving aged 17 as a common sailor, and taking part in the Klondike gold rush of 1897 . These various experiences provided the material for his works, and made him a socialist; as he was later to write, he had seen as a youth ‘the cellar of society…the pit, the abyss, the human cess-pool’, and he was to attack capitalism and exploitation with great vigour, while maintaining, to the embarrassment of some of his comrades, some markedly chauvinist and racist attitudes. The Son of the Wolf ( 1900 ), the first of his many collections of tales, is based upon life in the far...
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