Jack London Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jack London

While historians of American literature have routinely placed Jack London among the Naturalists, there are among his enormous output a number of works that belie such classification. Three of the novels--Before Adam (1907), The Iron Heel (1908), and The Star Rover (1915)--a novella, The Scarlet Plague (1915), and a dozen or so short stories are clearly works of science fiction, at least in the widest sense of that rather imprecise term. But just as literary historians have accorded little attention to the fantastic dimension of his art, so historians of science fiction have tended to scant London's contribution to their genre. Recently, however, the publication of two collections of his science-fiction stories and a growing critical reexamination of London's total achievement have focused interest on his role as a fabulist in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells. Yet his influence on the development of science fiction and his proper place in that tradition remain largely to be fixed.

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