Short stories
Western writer and historian Dale L. Walker writes:
- London's true métier was the short story . London's true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed. His stories that run longer than the magic 7,500 generally...but certainly not always...could have benefited from self-editing.
London's "strength of utterance" is at its height in his stories, and they are painstakingly well-constructed. "To Build a Fire" is the best known of all his stories. Set in the harsh Klondike, it recounts the haphazard trek of a new arrival who has ignored an old-timer's warning about the risks of traveling alone. Falling through the ice into a creek in seventy-five-below weather, the unnamed man is keenly aware that survival depends on his untested skills at quickly building a fire to dry his clothes and warm his extremities. After publishing a tame version of this story...with a sunny outcome...in
The Youth's Companion in 1902, London offered a second, more severe take on the man's predicament in
The Century Magazine in 1908. Reading both provides an illustration of London's growth and maturation as a writer. As Labor (1994) observes: "To compare the two versions is itself an instructive lesson in what distinguished a great work of literary art from a good children's story."
Other stories from the Klondike period include: "All Gold Canyon", about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; "The Law of Life", about an aging American Indian man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; "Love of Life", about a trek by a prospector across the Canadian tundra; "To the Man on Trail," which tells the story of a prospector fleeing the Mounted Police in a sled race, and raises the question of the contrast between written law and morality; and "An Odyssey of the North," which raises questions of conditional morality, and paints a sympathetic portrait of a man of mixed White and Aleut ancestry.
London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer. "A Piece of Steak" is a tale about a match between older and younger boxers. It contrasts the differing experiences of youth and age but also raises the social question of the treatment of aging workers. "The Mexican" combines boxing with a social theme, as a young Mexican endures an unfair fight and ethnic prejudice in order to earn money with which to aid the revolution.
Numerous stories of London would today be classified as science fiction. "The Unparalleled Invasion" describes germ warfare against China; "Goliah" revolves around an irresistible energy weapon; "The Shadow and the Flash" is a tale about two brothers who take different routes to achieving invisibility; "A Relic of the Pliocene" is a tall tale about an encounter of a modern-day man with a mammoth. "The Red One" is a late story from a period when London was intrigued by the theories of the psychiatrist and writer Jung. It tells of an island tribe held in thrall by an extraterrestrial object. His dystopian novel,
The Iron Heel, meets the contemporary definition of soft science fiction.
Some nineteen original collections of short stories were published during London's brief life or shortly after his death. There have been numerous posthumous anthologies drawn from this pool of nineteen books. Many of these collections have been themed around the locales of the Klondike and the Pacific. A collection of
Jack London's San Francisco Stories was published in October 2010 by Sydney Samizdat Press.
Novels
London's most famous novels are
The Call of the Wild,
White Fang,
The Sea-Wolf,
The Iron Heel, and
Martin Eden.
In a letter dated Dec 27, 1901, London's Macmillan publisher George Platt Brett, Sr. said "he believed Jack's fiction represented 'the very best kind of work' done in America."
Critic Maxwell Geismar called
The Call of the Wild "a beautiful prose poem;" editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with
Walden and
Huckleberry Finn"; and novelist E.L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable his masterpiece."
The historian Dale L. Walker commented:
Jack London was an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.
Critics have said his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes:
The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn is a synoptic series of short episodes.
Ambrose Bierce said of
The Sea-Wolf that "the great thing...and it is among the greatest of things...is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime." However, he noted, "The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful."
The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel that anticipates and influenced George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four. London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here.
Apocrypha
Jack London Credo
London's literary executor, Irving Shepard, quoted a "Jack London Credo" in an introduction to a 1956 collection of London stories:
- 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 function of man is to live, not to exist.
- I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
- I shall use my time.
The biographer Stasz notes that the passage "has many marks of London's style" but the only line that could be safely attributed to London was the first. Jack London's "Credo", Commentary by Clarice Stasz The words Shepard quoted were from a story in the
San Francisco Bulletin, December 2, 1916 by journalist Ernest J. Hopkins, who visited the ranch just weeks before London's death. Stasz notes "Even more so than today journalists' quotes were unreliable or even sheer inventions" and says no direct source in London's writings has been found.
The Scab
A short diatribe on "The Scab" is often quoted within the U.S. labor movement and frequently attributed to London. It opens:
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out...."
This passage figured in a 1974 Supreme Court case, in which Justice Thurgood Marshall quoted the passage in full and referred to it as "a well-known piece of trade union literature, generally attributed to author Jack London." A union newsletter had published a "list of scabs," which was granted to be factual and therefore not libelous, but then went on to quote the passage as the "definition of a scab." The case turned on the question of whether the "definition" was defamatory. The court ruled that "Jack London's... 'definition of a scab' is merely rhetorical hyperbole, a lusty and imaginative expression of the contempt felt by union members towards those who refuse to join," and as such was not libelous and was protected under the First Amendment.
The passage does not seem to appear in London's published work. He once gave a speech entitled "The Scab", which he published in his book
The War of the Classes, but this speech contains nothing similar to the "corkscrew soul" quotation and is completely different from it in content, style, and tone. Generally London did
not use demotic language in his writing except in dialogue spoken by his characters.
In 1913 and 1914, a number of newspapers printed a passage virtually identical to the first three sentences of the "scab" diatribe, except that the type of individual being vilified varies: God uses the awful substance to make, not a "scab," but a "knocker," or a "stool pigeon," or a "scandal monger." None of these sources name any author.
A 1913 Fort Worth newspaper columnist quotes the "Rule Review" as saying "After God had finished making the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, He had some awful substance left, with which he made the knocker." A Macon, Georgia paper published three full sentences of the definition of a "knocker."
A 1914 Duluth newspaper article, reporting on a trial, has the defense using this passage as a definition of a "stool pigeon."
In 1914 the
New Age Magazine, quoted a paragraph from
The Eastern Star, another Masonic publication. This passage, too, is virtually identical to the first three sentences of the "Scab" diatribe, except that it defines the "scandal monger."
Might is Right
Anton LaVey's Church of Satan claims that "Ragnar Redbeard", pseudonymous author of the 1896 book
Might is Right, was London. No London biographers mention any such possibility. Rodger Jacobs published an essay ridiculing this theory, arguing that in 1896 London was unfamiliar with philosophers heavily cited by "Redbeard", such as Nietzsche, and had not even begun to develop his mature literary style.
B. Traven
The enigmatic novelist B. Traven, best known in the U.S. as the author of
The Death Ship (1926) and
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), was hailed as "the German Jack London".
Traven kept his identity secret during his life. Almost every commentator on Traven mentions in passing a fanciful speculation that Traven actually was London. It is not clear whether this suggestion was ever made seriously. No London biographer has even bothered to mention it. Any serious assertion that London authored Traven's best-known novels would need to reconcile their publication dates with London's death certificate, which states that London died in 1916. Supporters of this theory suggest that London only pretended to have died.
The identification of Traven with London is one of many such speculations...another unlikely one being Ambrose Bierce. In a 1990 interview Traven's widow identified Traven as Ret Marut, a left-wing revolutionary in Germany during World War I.