Jack London

Jack London (12 January, 1876 – 22 November, 1916) was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing. Jack London was deserted by his father when he was 11. He was raised in Oakland, California by his mother Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist. Because Flora was ill, Jack was raised through infancy by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss, who would remain a major maternal figure while the boy grew up. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where Jack completed grade school. Though the family was working class, it was not as impoverished as London's later accounts claimed. Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe that Jack London's father was astrologer William Chaney. Whether...