Jack London: An American Life
*Starred Review* Jack London (1876–1916) improvised a fast-burning life of reckless adventure that served as the wellspring for his magnificently dramatic writings, from The Call of the Wild to Martin Eden. A good student and insatiable reader ever-grateful for the public library in Oakland, California, young London, poor and fatherless, worked demeaning jobs, then took to sea as an oyster pirate. He learned to fight and drink and became a socialist and constant wanderer. His Klondike escapades yielded a gold mine of stories and inspired his lifelong practice of writing 1,000 words a day, no matter what. London scholar Labor extracts every drop of excitement, folly, romance, creative ecstasy, grueling effort, and despair from the vast London archives, including the relentless press coverageof his exploits. What writer today could ignite the front-page frenzy that surrounded London and the love of his life, Charmian? His fearless second wife, literary accomplice, and stalwart companion on perilous South Sea journeys, Charmian kept a diary from which Labor extracts riveting disclosures leading up to her robust, sexy, carousing husband’s precipitously failing health and early death. 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