Early Life

Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney, on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. Jack’s mother, Flora Wellman, was a spiritualist and his biological father was an astrologist who left town when Flora fell pregnant. Flora then married John London, a widowed, disabled civil war veteran, the same year as Jack’s birth. The family’s economic circumstances were always dire and to help support the family, Jack had held several jobs by age ten.

At thirteen, he left school and worked odd jobs, turning most of his pay over to his parents. Then, with the help of a loan of $300 from a family friend, he purchased a fourteen-foot skiff, the Razzle Dazzle. Jack used the skiff to poach oysters, selling them to local restaurants and saloons. The criminals he fell in with nicknamed him “The Prince of the Oyster Pirates”. He, in turn, called them “the booze fighters”. Unfortunately, they also introduced him to heavy drinking. This led to a lifelong addiction to alcohol.

A Vagabond Life

By the time Jack was fifteen, he worked eighteen hours a day in a cannery enduring appalling conditions for ten cents an hour to support his family. At age sixteen, Jack joined the California Fish Patrol. Then, in 1893, on his seventeenth birthday, Jack signed aboard the Sophia Sutherland, a three-masted schooner, as an able-bodied seaman. Onboard, he headed to the Pacific Northwest and Japan for a seal-hunting expedition.

Off the coast of Japan, the ship ran into a typhoon so fierce each man could only tolerate a one hour turn at the wheel. Fortunately, the ship survived the storm and returned to San Francisco six months later. Jack regarded the voyage as a seminal turning point in his life. Finally, he had returned home a man.

The Hobo Life

Back on land, he was broke again after handing over his wages to his mother. In 1894 Jack was travelling as a hobo across America’s rail tracks. In Niagra Falls, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to 30 days gaol. According to Jack, those 30 days were so degrading it made him decide to return to education and resume writing.

After a brief stint at a jute mill, followed by a power plant, he enrolled and completed high school. Jack then attended the University of California, where he embraced socialism. The San Francisco Examiner printed a speech he wrote and profiled him as a “boy socialist”. However, he left university after one semester due to lack of funds. Jack travelled with his sister’s husband to the Alaskan Klondike for the gold rush of 1897.

The Writer Emerges

“It was in the Klondike,” London said, “that I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.”

Jack London, Smithsonian Institute

While on the Klondike, he became severely malnourished. He lost several of his front teeth to scurvy, and his failing health forced him to return home. While Jack didn’t strike it lucky on the Klondike, he had brought back a wealth of raw material for his books. Returning to California in 1898, he learned his step-father, John London, had died. The death of his stepfather brought about the decision to dedicate himself to professional writing to support his mother. Drawing on his Klondike experiences, he began writing about Alaska’s bleak, frozen landscape.

I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy,” London declared. He netted just four dollars and fifty cents’ worth of gold dust.

Jack London, The New Yorker

By 1899 his stories attracted several major magazines. The publication of these stories gave him a secure, middle-class life. In 1900 he married and had two daughters. The Call of the Wild was published in 1903, and at 27, he became a huge celebrity. His rugged good looks, youthful vitality, travels, and political activism made him the darling of political reporters and gossip columnists alike.

Jack London- war correspondent

A skilled photographer, Jack’s subjects included the homeless in Londons East End Slums to the refugees of the Russo-Japanese war. He was a fearless photojournalist and was arrested by the Japanese secret police twice for taking photographs of Japanese forces.

Jack wrote an eyewitness account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. He returned two weeks later with his camera to document the city in ruins. 1914 he covered the U.S. invasion of Veracruz during the Mexican revolution for the Hearst newspapers.

People Of The Abyss

In 1902 Jack visited London as he wanted to expose, in his words, the “underside of imperialism”. To pass unnoticed among the working poor, he disguised himself as an American sailor who had lost his ship. Jack lived among them, photographing the conditions of their everyday life. His experiences and photographs of living in Londons East End and the Whitechapel district, sometimes sleeping on the streets, at other times in workhouses were documented in his book “The People of the Abyss” (still available on Amazon)

“Of all my books, the one I love most is The People of the Abyss. No other work of mine contains as much of my heart.”

Jack London

A 1909 report of the Poor Law Commission found that one-third of the East End’s 900,000 strong population lived in conditions of extreme poverty. The report also detailed the squalor of conditions in these areas, with an average of 25 houses sharing one lavatory and fresh-water tap between them. One response to a dire lack of sanitation in London’s poorest areas was the provision of communal washhouses for bathing and clothes-washing; an average of 60,000 people each week used the 50 such bathhouses which existed across the city in 1910

Rare Historical Photos

ever the adventurer

Jack London’s marriage collapsed in 1904 when his wife discovered he was having an affair with Charmain Kittredge, who became the second Mrs London. He continued writing short stories and articles and published The Sea Wolf and White Fang. At thirty, he became the highest-paid writer in the country. Jack began designing a 45-foot sailboat he named the Snark after the Lewis Carroll Poem.

In 1907 Jack and Charmain sailed to Hawaii and the South Seas with a small crew. They followed this by driving a four-horse wagon on a 1500-mile trip through Oregon in 1911. The following year in 1912, they sailed from Baltimore around Cape Horn to Seattle as passengers aboard the square-rigged sailing bark Dirigo.

Ill health

Due to the effects of amoebic dysentery he had caught in Mexico and his heavy drinking, Jack had been in ill health for some time. In 1913 Jack underwent an appendectomy, and doctors discovered his seriously diseased kidneys. However, he ignored doctors’ warnings against a high protein diet, insisting on raw fish and near-raw duck meals. In addition, he continued to smoke 60 Russian cigarettes a day and continued to drink heavily.

The Final Years

In the last two years of his life, Jack endured recurring bouts of dysentery, kidney stones, gastric disorders and rheumatism and his doctors prescribed morphine for the pain. Jack and his wife made two extended trips to Hawaii for Jack to rest and recover. However, on November 22, 1916, Jack London died of uremic poisoning from kidney failure and a probable stroke. In 18 years, he had written 50 books, 20 of them novels, and taken thousands of photographs, most of which remained unpublished until 2010.

Although she was often bedridden following repeated strokes, Charmian lived another forty years. She died in 1955, at the age of 83. Her ashes rest beside Jack’s under the rock that marks their grave near Glen Ellen, California, at Jack London State Historic Park.

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Jack London

Note: all photojournalist images used in this post were taken by Jack London

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