But he had trouble finding willing publishers. When she saw an announcement in one of the local papers for a writing contest, she pushed her son to write down and submit his story.Īrmed with just an eighth-grade education, London captured the $25 first prize, beating out college students from Berkeley and Stanford.įor London, the contest was an eye-opening experience, and he decided to dedicate his life to writing short stories. The 17-year-old adventurer had made it home and regaled his mother with his tales of what had happened to him.

That year he had weathered a harrowing sealing voyage, one in which a typhoon had nearly taken out London and his crew. His life as a writer essentially began in 1893. In his free time he hunkered down at libraries, soaking up novels and travel books. He rode trains, pirated oysters, shoveled coal, worked on a sealing ship on the Pacific and found employment in a cannery. He carved out his own hardscrabble life as a teen. His father was never part of his life, and his mother ended up marrying John London, a Civil War veteran, who moved his new family around the Bay Area before settling in Oakland. Jack, as he came to call himself as a boy, was the son of Flora Wellman, an unwed mother, and William Chaney, an attorney, journalist and pioneering leader in the new field of American astrology.

John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. London, who was also a journalist and an outspoken socialist, died in 1916. His novels, including The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Martin Eden, placed London among the most popular American authors of his time. After working in the Klondike, Jack London returned home and began publishing stories.

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