Jack London Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jack London

"No literary historian but sooner or later must reckon with Jack London," Fred Lewis Pattee asserts in The Development of the American Short Story (1923), for "he represented more than an individual: he was the product of a literary condition in America. To understand the opening years of the new century one must study Jack Londonism."

Since the publishing of Pattee's pioneering study two generations ago, Jack London has become universally acclaimed as one of the most dynamic figures in American literature. Sailor, hobo, Klondike argonaut, social crusader, war correspondent, scientific farmer, self-made millionaire, global traveler, and adventurer: London captured the popular imagination worldwide as much through his personal exploits as through his literary efforts. But it is the quality of his writings, more than his personal legend, that has won him a permanent place in world literature and distinguished him as our most widely translated author. The Danish critic Georg Brandes considered him the best of our new twentieth-century writers: "He is absolutely original," wrote Brandes, "and his style is singularly forcible and free from all affectation." Anatole France remarked that "London had that particular genius which perceives what is hidden from the common herd, and possessed a special knowledge enabling him to anticipate the future." More recently, the Russian scholar Vil Bykov, comparing London favorably with Tolstoy and Chekhov, has observed that it is the "life-asserting force" in London's writings and particularly the portrayal of "the man of noble spirit" which have "helped London to find his way to the heart of the Soviet reader." Among a number of contemporary European critics he is considered "possibly the most powerful of all American writers."

London was, in fact, a writer of extraordinary vitality.

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