Today London is remembered as both one of America's greatest writers
and one of the greatest adventure writers of all time.
The man readers as Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in the strangest of circumstances. His mother, Flora Wellman, was raised in a wealthy Ohio family. Suffering from mental instability caused by a childhood case of typhoid fever, Wellman ran away from home at age seventeen and gave piano lessons in the growing western town of San Francisco, California. By 1894, she was living with a strange man named William Chaney, who advertised himself as a professor of astrology. Chaney was in fact a professional wanderer, according to London biographer Alan Schroeder: "Distrustful of people and prone to arguments, [Chaney] abandoned one wife after another, one occupation after another." In the summer of 1875, Wellman told Chaney that she was expecting a child. Chaney panicked, demanded that she terminate the pregnancy, and fled, never to see his son.
Wellman took Chaney's departure hard, consuming an overdose of opium and trying to shoot herself in the head with a pistol. When both attempts at suicide failed, Wellman reconciled herself to having a child, and gave birth to a son on January 12, 1876.
This is a free page. This page contains 183 words. This
biography contains 5,537 words (approx. 18 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Jack London Access Pass.
