It is an arguable point that Jack london 1876 to 1916 was the first American Super Author whose living came entirely from writing Fiction. In effect the first best seller author.

In many ways he shares the accolade with his contemporary  Stephen Crane  1871 to 1900 the author of 'The Red Badge of Courage', but it is because London was able to break into the burgeoning market of weekly or monthly Magazine published short stories and articles, that gave him the edge over Crane, albeit for Cranes early demise at the age of 28  from tubercolosis.
Had he lived who knows what might have happened.

London was born in San Francisco in 1876 the son of a liasion between Flora Wellman and William Cheney, a father who later deserted the  family when London was 11 years old.

His mother a music teacher and spritualist raised him through infancy with the help of an ex slave called Virginia Prentis, who as his adoptive foster mother, was to remain a significant influence on him for the rest of his life.

In or around 1886 his mother met and married John London and after moving around the San Francisco bay area for a few years, the family eventually settled in Oakland California.

There London taught himself to write, and that essential factor marks him as a very raw writer  where as Crane who had a formal university eduction is less hard around the edges. London's propensity for grammar errors at times is legendry, but it is his self taught lust for the written word that marks him  as 'out of the mold'

It is apparent from his early writings and later in his autobiographical novel 'Martin Eden', that London always saw himself as a proffesional writer, and set about achieving that aim. The central character of the novel ' Martin Eden' is indeed a struggling young writer.

London's appetite to learn the craft was immense yet, being of an adventurous disposition, and having worked long hours at the Hickmotts cannery, with little advance in his fortunes, he sought a way out of the wage slavery as he saw it and sought a loan from his foster mother Victoria Prentiss. He was then a mere 13 or 14 years old.

With the money he bargained for the sloop  Razzle dazzle and bought it off an Oyster pirate named French Frankie and at the tender age of 15 became an Oyster pirate himself.

In his equally autobiagraohical 'John Barleycorn' , he chronicles the life of a commercial fishery pirate and that of his own romantic imaginings when he claimed to have stolen French Frankies mistress, a lady known as Mamie. His adventures knew no bounds apparantly. 

After a few months his sloop ran aground and was damaged irrepairably. London was again at his low luck. He then applied for and got a post on the other side of the law when he was accepted into the Fishery protection patrol.

Emminently disatisfied with the speed of his achievement even at this young age and always apt to a 'butterfly' complex, he signed up in 1893 onto a seal hunting ship The 'Sophie Sutherland', bound for the coast of Japan. It is  his experiences on this voyage that  were the inspiration for his book 'The Sea Wolf' wherein he creates one of the most powerful and prophetic characters in Literature.

For arguably Wolf Larsen is one of the most terrifying of 'beasts' amongst men. It was London's skill as a descriptive master that allowed the gradual build up of  menace , so that the reader becomes dominated by Larson as they read.

Jack returned to Oakland in late 1893 to find  unrest abroad in the streets as united labour groups  demonstrated their anger about working conditions.

After a spell in a Jute mill with little pay for gruelling hours of work he joined a band of hobos, fugitives from the labour unrest, known as 'Kelly's industrial Army' and became a bum.

It is recorded that in 1894 he spent a spell in the Eerie state penitentiary for a charge of vagrancy. His ecperiences here were to have a profound effect on his burgeoning political leanings.

It is however the Klondyke that fashioned his career above all else for after a spell of attending  Calfifornia University in 1896, an academic adventure cut short by financial matters in 1897, Jack London and his brother in law James Shepherd set sail for Skagway and joined the Klondyke gold rush.

It is here that London became most spectacularly the writer he was. It is here that his preoccupation with the idea of man set against nature came to the for. It is in the klondyke writings that we see that specific matter he carried in his mind constantly, that life is a battle of will,win it and you merely survive, lose the will and you lose you  life.

In his short story called 'The love of life' London explores the theme to its most spectacular conclusion.

His idea that a man particularly living in a harsh climate such as the Canadian Northwest must have imagination ,

'Show me a man with no imagination and  i will show you a dead man'

Is spectacularly demonstrated in what many observers consider to be the best short story ever written .

In  his story 'To build a fire'  he takes the theme of a novice traveller in the Yukon, breaking trail in vicious sub zero temperatures, and produces descriptively, a horror story. In that tale he makes a point that the mans problems were not set in the fact that he was a novice, but that he was a man with no imagination.

In the yukon one could not survive without imagination was the creed that London expounded.

Yet for all his apparant expertise in survival in the northern territories London actually only spent a little over 12 months there and returned to Oakland in late 1898 with little to show for his spell in the klondyke goldfields.

His treasures were to be found in the wealth of anecdotes he brought back with him, and short though his stay was, it is the yukon interlude that produced his most spectacular writing. It is the experience of the Yukon, all the privations endured, all the ruining of his health that constant malnutrition  brought that developed his inner identity his ID, his identification with the  those Northern regions through two specific subliminal preoccupations of the mind.

In the first place London lauded the idea of a lone character fighting the odds through sheer determination and winning through because they had none of the 'clutter' produced  by the trappings of married life.

In 'The call of the wild' he tracks away from his main theme when he highlights the character of Jack Thornton as a man drawn to domesticity yet yearning the freedom of the trail. Indeed throughout the whole of his Yukon stories he constantly returns to this theme of lone self sufficient masculinity
In the story 'To build a fire' he refers to an idea that he himself promoted, that if one travels in the Yukon, one does so the speediest and alone unless, said he, the temperature is at fifty below and more.

Yet the theme most prevalent in his mind is the theme that so spectacularly produced his most successful novels.

Both 'White Fang' and 'Call of the wild' takes a concept that seems to have haunted him constantly, that of the primeval wolf dog. It is a theme that he  returns to in a number of his texts. 

Both of his major Yukon novels use the same theme yet in each he adds another dimension as he does in a number of his Klondyke short stories.

That dimension inevitably links the iinteraction between man and dog as central to mutual survival. It also examines  the bond that cannot be broken between a man and his dog.

At the penulitmate ending to 'Call of the wild' who, can escape the significance of the dog now turned into a wolf pack leader, who visits from time to time the spot where his former master Jack Thornton lies beneath the ice. It is a powerful image, yet often overlooked by Holywood in its versions of the story. Often in film versions the  central character of the story is misrepresented as the man, where in fact London makes the dog the central character.

Like wise in  'White fang'  London makes the dog central to a story which reverses the theme he expounded in 'Call of the Wild' and tells of a wild animal gradually brought to domesticity by kindness. It deals beautifully again with the relationship between man and his dog. Kindness, brutality doth make the man and the animal.   

In a short story called 'Batard' or 'Diable' depending on the version Jack tells the story of a dog owned by a brutaly cruel trapper  who ultimately meets a prophetic death at the behest of the dog. At its moment of triumph  the dog wreaks a revenge that is well sought, again a story from London's subconcious that explores the constant theme of bestiality and kindness. Wild nature versus tamed power, civilised existance, the difference some claim, between man and beast, is the soul. London explores that theme again and again.

Yet the short time spent in the Yukon was to have such a profound influence on his writing career that is hard to believe he was ever any where else.

His emergence from the rigours of life on the gold fields funded him with a wealth of stories that were highly suitable for a commercial market.

Improvements and developments in the printing process at the turn of the century meant that mass circulation of periodicals and magazines was possible.

Jack Londons short tales of the Yukon were just what a hungry public required.and London made good his fame, by writing mainly short stories of his life in the Yukon. Indeed it is known that 'Call of the Wild' itself began as a short story and it over ran. 

London's strength however was not only in his vivid imagination which was awesome enough, but in his ability to take the most mundane of incidents and to dramatise it so that the reader became transfixed.

It was his descriptive texts that dramatised the simplest situations into  masterpieces.

Take for instance this paragraph from the opening chapter of  of 'White fang'

'But there was life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on the sled--blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.

In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil was over'.

The excerpt is from London's most celebrated novel, and demonstrates in my view the exceptional descriptive power of the author. He undeniably wrote about the life he led and in itself it is a very macho pen for most of his work.
London is essentially at home writing about survival of the fittest in the icy wastes of the Yukon and in the raging seas off the North Western seaboard of the United States and Canada. It is all the more surprising therefore given this, to find such tenderness in his description of the pretty girl in Martin Eden his one plainly autobiographical novel. 

'And then he turned and saw the girl.  The phantasmagoria of his
brain vanished at sight of her.  She was a pale, ethereal creature,
with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair.  He did
not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as
wonderful as she.  He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a
slender stem.  No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such
sublimated beauty was not of the earth'. 

His description of his first meeting with the girl is a masterpiece of a young man feeling ashamed of his rough bearing and how he fights his emotions, smitten by her wondrous beauty. It demonstrates wondefully, that London was a man of deep emotion.

Beset by illness following his debilitating experiences of the hardships of life London, who had married twice, once for friendship to  Bess Maddern in 1900 and then following his divorce in 1905 to his life's soul mate Charmian Kittredge. The marriage was singularly successful and together they travelled on many voyages including two to Hawai. The last voyage was just proir to his death in 1916.

he died at home on his ranch in Sonoma California of Euremic poisoning.
He had suffered from the condition for many years and prior to his death was in great pain, having to take regular doses of Morphine.

He had been in such a depressed state prior to his death on November 22nd 1916, that following his demise rumours spread throughout the literary world that he had in fact died of an overdose of the drug, administered by his own hand. This was never proven and passed into the London folklore such that for nearly half a century the myth of an alcoholic womaniser was prominent.

His strength as a writer, his unique skill at the short story, was surmounted by few. In his hey day, London took the literary world by storm and led the way by showing what could be achieved by the modern author given the new printing technologies. His stort stories were rarely longer than 7500 words and were action packed from start to finish.

His reputation survived repeated accusations of plaguerism including one significant claim by Edgar R Young that in fact 'The Call Of The Wild' was a downright theft of his own work  'My Dogs In The Northland'.

London was amongst that breed of adventure writers that were prevalent at the turn of the century and he holds his own with the best Ryder Haggard, Rudyard Kipling R M Ballantyne, John Buchan, Dashel Hammet and the like.

he was a essentially the champion of 'daring do' at his worse but a sensitive commentator on social interaction on the other. A super author beyond a doubt who died much too young at 40 and deprived the world of an unfulfilled brilliant talent.