John Griffith Chaney: Tragic Hero Or Whisper?

John Griffith Chaney, or Jack London, was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California to Flora Wellman. His suspected father, William Chaney, deserted his mother and, consequently, she later married Civil War veteran John London; hereafter, John Griffith Chaney would be referred to as Jack London to differentiate from his stepfather. Wellman never showed much affection for her son and referred to him as her “badge of shame” as she was unsure whom his biological father was. At the age of eleven (1887), Jack began to work as a paperboy to help support his working-class family; at the age of twelve (1888), he bought a small skiff and taught himself to sail; and at the age of fourteen (1890), he graduated Cole Grammar School. However,

Next, Jack, at the age of sixteen (1892), worked as a watchman, joined a rough gang (in which he assumed the moniker “Sailor Kid”) and worked with the California Fish Patrol to help capture oyster pirates. When he was seventeen (1893), Jack worked in a jute mill, in which he earned ten cents an hour, and signed on to be a sailor on the “Sophia Sutherland”, a three-masted schooner, for a seven-month voyage along the Behring Sea and the Coast of Japan. In addition, that same year, under the persuasion of his mother, Jack entered a writing contest, competing against students from Stanford and University of California, and won first place, for which the prize was being published in the San Francisco Call and being rewarded with twenty-five dollars, with his essay “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan”. Later, at the age of eighteen (1894), Jack worked to shovel coal, joined Kelley’s army (a group of unemployed men who marched on the capital, Washington D.C., from Massillon, Ohio as the Western contingent of Coxey’s Industrial Army of the Unemployed), decided to strike on his own, visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, roamed around the United States

In 1893, his essay, titled “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan”, was published in the San Francisco Call for twenty-five dollars; in 1899, his story, “To the Man on Trail”, was published in Overland Monthly for five dollars; in 1900, A Son of The Wolf, a collection of short stories, was published by Houghton Mifflin (and is often quoted as being the “beginning of the modern American short-story”) and “An Odyssey of the North” (based on Jack’s experiences during gold rush in Klondike) was published by Atlantic Monthly for forty dollars; in 1901, Jack ran in, and lost, the mayoral race and The God of his Fathers and Other Stories, his second collection of short-stories, was published by McLure, Phillips; in 1902, his third collection of short-stories, Children of the Frost, was published by Macmillan, The Cruise of the Dazzler (based on Jack’s experience of living in San Francisco) was published by Century, and Daughter of the Snows (based on Jack’s experience living in Klondike) was published by Lippincott. In the same year, Jack moved his family to Piedmont Hills, travelled to London, and was hired as a war-correspondent writer for the South African Boer War. Unfortunately for Jack, the war ended before he had a chance to reach London; however, despite