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Jack London: An American Life

Earle Labor

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374534918
ISBN13: 9780374534912

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496 Pages

$22.00

CA$29.00

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Winner of the Western Writers of America's Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction Biography

Jack London was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast-an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed bestselling books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf.

The bare outlines of his story suggest a classic rags-to-riches tale, but London the man was plagued by contradictions. He chronicled nature at its most savage, but wept helplessly at the deaths of his favorite animals. At his peak the highest paid writer in the United States, he was nevertheless forced to work under constant pressure for money. An irrepressibly optimistic crusader for social justice and a lover of humanity, he was also subject to spells of bitter invective, especially as his health declined. Branded by shortsighted critics as little more than a hack who produced a couple of memorable dog stories, he left behind a voluminous literary legacy, much of it ripe for rediscovery.

In Jack London: An American Life, the noted Jack London scholar Earle Labor explores the brilliant and complicated novelist lost behind the myth-at once a hard-living globe-trotter and a man alive with ideas, whose passion for seeking new worlds to explore never waned until the day he died. Returning London to his proper place in the American pantheon, Labor resurrects a major American novelist in his full fire and glory.

Reviews

Praise for Jack London: An American Life

"A lively and authoritative biography."-Caleb Crain, The New Yorker

"Mr. Labor-an excellent writer, who knows the London canon backward and forward, brings this most American of authors to vivid life. Jack London: An American Life is almost as much fun to read as its subject's best work . . . Mr. Labor, a professor of American literature at Centenary College in Shreveport, La., is the country's foremost London scholar. He wisely lets London's life and art unfold without judgment. Despite his continuing popularity, London has often been dismissed as a mere writer of boys' tales. But at his best he is among the greatest writers that this country has produced. If you want proof, just read his short story 'To Build a Fire' and then read this terrific book."-John Steele Gordon, The Wall Street Journal

"[A] first-rate literary biography . . . [an] authoritative new life of Jack London (1876-1916) . . . Earle Labor's Jack London: An American Life doesn't take away any of its subject's glamour or fascination. To the contrary. The book is not just definitive, as one would expect from the major London scholar of the past fifty years, it is also exceptionally entertaining . . . As Earle Labor makes clear in his fine biography, Jack London was a remarkable man and a writer of impressive variety, richness, and accomplishment."-Michael Dirda, Virginia Quarterly Review

"Earle Labor's new book about London, subtitled 'An American Life,' is an obvious labor of love (no pun intended). As curator of the Jack London Museum and Research Center in Shreveport, La., and professor emeritus of American literature at Centenary College of Louisiana, Labor is the acknowledged national authority on the life and work of London. Labor's work was graced by personal friendships with London's two daughters, Joan and Becky, as well as his own discovery of Charmian London's personal diaries in a safe at the 'Cottage' in Sonoma, Arizona.-diaries that London's wife herself called 'disloyal' because of their intimate frankness. To these new sources were added a number of previously undiscovered London letters and discussions with the descendants of London's bohemian friends in the Bay Area . . . Labor sets out to 'neither maximize nor minimize' [London's faults] but only to accept London on his own terms as a natural-born seeker; a gifted artist of exceptional intelligence, sensitivity and personal charisma; a man driven by a Nietzschean outlook on life at a time when literature was stuck between Victorian romanticism and the modernism that wouldn't be born until after the First World War . . . Labor's book recalls the man himself with great charm of manner."-Gaylord Dold, The Wichita Eagle

"What a life. What a man. What a book . . . Only superlatives can describe this definitive biography of the nation's most popular and successful novelist of the early twentieth century . . . Earle Labor has devoted much of a lifetime to the study of London and his works and has given us a book so meticulous in its fast-moving detail that the reader feels he is almost at London's side . . . Biographer Earle Labor summarizes Jack London succinctly: ' . . . few writers mirror so clearly the American Dream of success and the corollary idea of the 'Self-Made Man.'"-Peter Hannaford, The Washington Times

"Far from being an academic tract, [Jack London] is written in a fresh engaging style revealing an author who loves good literature as much as he loves the subject of his biography . . . An ideal complement to London's fiction."-Tony Williams (author of Jack London: The Movies, An Historical Survey), Jack London Foundation, Inc., Quarterly Newsletter

"Labor, co-editor of authoritative editions of London's letters and stories, matches his subject in industry . . . Labor definitively puts to rest the persistent rumour of London's suicide." -Marc Robinson, The Times Literary Supplement

"I rarely read biographies such as this-accurate, gripping, written like an adventure book but always with an understated sense of reality that reminds the reader this really happened." -Davide Sapienza, Italian translator of Jack London's works

"Quite a few books have been published recently about Jack London's fabulous life, but Earle Labor's Jack London: An American Life is undoubtedly the definitive biography Written by the internationally acknowledged maestro of Jack London studies, the book demonstrates both the detailed scholarly documentation and the intelligent empathy with London's complex mindset that one has missed in previous biographies." -Per Serritslev Petersen, University of Aarhus, Denmark

"At long last, Jack London gets the authoritative biography he so richly deserves. Earle Labor is the true-blue dean of London studies. This portrait is brilliantly researched, elegantly written, and brimming with new facts about the brave author of The Call of the Wild. Highly recommended!" -Douglas Brinkley, author of Cronkite

"There was a time-before the Great War and the frontier's closing drove the creative spark inward-when American novelists launched the reader off into unfettered narratives as raw, brawny, explosive, and drenched in gritty personal experience as the nation that inspired them. Jack London was among the last of the great ones. Now comes London's London, the biographer Earle Labor, to turn the light of truth-telling back upon this magnificent half-forgotten outlaw of our literature."-Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life

"In this comprehensive account, more richly detailed than any prior biography of Jack London, Earle Labor debunks common myths. Labor's crisp prose quotes extensively, allowing the reader to interpret the full character of this noted writer, rancher, and traveler. In placing London within the context of the tumultuous Progressive Era, Labor further explains the contradictory choices and beliefs of this complex individual. The result limns a portrait of a brilliant, creative, sensitive yet self-assured man who died prematurely, on the cusp of still greater offerings."-Clarice Stasz, author of Jack London's Women

"Not so long ago, Jack London was considered a literary titan and a great American hero akin to Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway-as famous for his wild adventures as for his bestselling books. Earle Labor's eloquent, deeply researched biography has brought London and his fascinating world back to life in all its vivid, colorful detail." -Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

"Labor's unceasingly vivid, often outright astonishing biography vibrantly chronicles London's exceptionally daring and wildly contradictory life and recovers and reassesses his complete oeuvre, including many powerful, long-neglected works of compassionate, eyewitness nonfiction. Let the Jack London revival begin."-Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

1


MOTHERS AND FATHERS
I was impotent at that time, the result of hardship, privation & too much brain-work. Therefore I cannot be your father, nor am I sure who your father is.
—W. H. CHANEY TO JACK LONDON
The...