Jack London was a jailbird. A hobo. A sailor, seal hunter, pirate, gold-miner, laundered, yachtsman, and coal shoveler. He was a drinker, a brawler, and a heavy smoker. He was a husband (twice) and a father (twice). He was a socialist candidate for mayor of Oakland, California. He was a rancher. A world-traveler. A voracious reader. A loyal correspondent whose collected letters fill three large volumes. A lecturer whose fiery speeches ignited controversy where ever …showed first 75 words of 643 total…

…showed last 75 words of 643 total…to riches, a poor boys rise to world fame and great wealth-but with the ironic ending that it makes a cautionary lesson in the price exacted for persuading the Goddess successes. London's career constituted one of the darkest chronicles in our literary annals wrote Maxwell Geismar, who agreed in Rebels and Ancestors that "the drama of his life, bold, sensational, tragic, has almost obscured the history of his writing, and his works has been ignored". 1.