"I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew," Jack London once wrote of his decision to take to the seas as an oyster pirate at the age of fifteen. "There was vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate or a convict than in being a machine slave." London's venturesome spirit brought him more adventure before he was twenty-three years old than most people experience in a lifetime. London was a coal shoveler, a sailor, a hobo and a convict all before he entered high school, and when he finally got to high school he found it so boring he packed his bags and headed for the Yukon in search of gold. London spent his first twenty-three years as an adventurer and a vagabond, but in 1899, after years of fitful trying, he finally began to achieve success as a writer. Before his death in 1916, London wrote...