Jack London

Jack London (1876–1916) was an American writer born in San Francisco who worked in a cannery, an oyster-pirate sloop, a sealing schooner and a jute mill, tramped across the country, spent a winter in the Klondike gold rush and read himself into socialism before he was twenty-one. The Call of the Wild in 1903 made him famous, and The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden and hundreds of stories followed, written at a thousand words a day. He was for a time the highest-paid writer in America, spent it on a ranch and a yacht, and died at forty, worn out by illness, alcohol and work.