Jack London was born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. Raised in poverty, he started working part-time to support his family at the age of nine and dropped out of school a few years later to work and travel full-time. He educated himself through reading, deriving special pleasure from the stories of Washington Irving and Rudyard Kipling.

London spent his teen-age years sailing aboard a sealing schooner, tramping across the country as a hobo, and working at a variety of odd jobs. He later drew upon these early adventures in books such as The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and The Sea-Wolf (1904).

When he was twenty years old, London enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley. He had just begun to read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848). The ideas of Darwin and Marx profoundly influenced his thinking and writing. The...