Author Description

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of new scholarship around the world on American writer Jack London (1876-1916), author of such eternal classics as The Call of the Wild (1903), now translated into over 80 languages; The Sea Wolf (1904); and White Fang (1905). Earle Labor and Jeanne Campbell Reesman significantly advance the rising tide of critical interest with this illuminating, beautifully written, and appropriately adventurous new update of Labor's 1974 study. Reading many overlooked yet masterful stories and revealing the deep ties among London's times and his life, beliefs, and writings, the authors apply new critical approaches to his narrative structure and style and move beyond the misconceptions that have limited appreciation of the great short story writer, novelist, journalist, adventurer, socialist, and undeterrable individualist. While he produced a thousand words a day for 17 years, selling virtually everything he wrote, commanding top dollar from such magazines as Atlantic and Harper's, and producing over 50 books - on topics ranging from Klondike gold-hunting to Socialism, from prize-fighting to agrarianism - London's greatness lay in far more than his ability to produce for the marketplace. Instead, as Labor and Reesman convincingly illustrate, London's work departs sharply from the best-seller formulas of his age. He pioneered the apocalyptic novel and dystopian fiction; his People of the Abyss (1903) compares favorably with William Blake's treatises on England's poor; his indictment of the white man's South Seas excursions is as incisive as Herman Melville's; and his use of themes from Freud and Jung anticipated the new literature of the 1920s. Exploring such extraordinary works as Martin Eden (1909), London's autobiographical masterpiece; The Cruise of the Snark (1911), the compelling account of his sailing voyage halfway around the world; and The Star Rover (1915), his fantastic dramatization of astral projection, Labor and Reesman neatly lay to rest a second misconception: that London's creative energies declined during the last decade of his life. The rich rewards of reading Jack London become newly accessible in the pages of this pioneering study. Labor and Reesman probe the mystery of London's remarkable creative genius, applying Jung's concept of "primordial vision" to his experience of his world and its expression in such works as The Call of the Wild. They meaningfully consider London's writing in the context of America in its pre-World War I adolescence, describing the author's lifelong struggle with the American Dream and his exquisitely vivid rendering of the frontier and the gold rush in his powerful Yukon stories. They address his philosophical struggle with Individualism and Socialism and examine the commingling of Naturalism and Romanticism in his art. Finally, they also reveal how ideas such as feminism helped shape the innovative narrative forms - dialogic and polyphonic - of London's late fiction. This welcome revision greatly enhances any reading of London, expands his canon beyond boundaries held by critics to date, and firmly places him on the ballot for recognition as a major American writer.