John Griffith London, the illegitimate son of a freelance philosopher and self-proclaimed Professor of Astrology father and an emotionally distant spiritualist mother, was born January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. The boy, later known as Jack, spent much of his childhood working odd jobs to help support his family. After traveling abroad on a seal-hunting ship and tramping across much of the United States, Jack briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley. When news of the gold rush in the Yukon reached him, he packed his bags and left California with thousands of other would-be prospectors to test his mettle in the frozen north. After spending the winter and the spring of 1898 in the Yukon, London had not found an ounce of gold and was suffering the effects of scurvy, a disease brought about by dietary deficiencies. Realizing he was beaten, London returned to California without gold, but with a wealth of experiences and impressions from the Klondike that would soon be captured in the stories and novels for which he became famous. The most successful of these Klondike tales is The Call of the Wild, a novel that propelled London to the forefront of American fiction.
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