Jack London

              Jack London
Author of
The Call of the Wild   The Sea Wolf etc.


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Jack London: Author and Lecturer
THE Slayton Lyceum Bureau takes great pleasure in presenting Jack London to the public as a platform attraction.  Jack London was born in San Francisco, January 12, 1876.  He once essayed a climb among the branches of the family tree and traced both parental lines back to an American residence prior to the Revolution.  On his mother's side he wound up with Priest Jones, one of the first settlers of Ohio and a circuit rider.  On his father's side he followed the lineal branch to New Jersey, which later on removed to Pennsylvania soon after Braddock's defeat.  Also, in four generations, he discovered the mingled strains of six nationalities—English, Welsh, Dutch, Swiss, French and German.

He lived on California ranches, where life cannot be said to be very nourishing to the imagination, until his tenth year, when his parents removed to Oakland, where, as he says, he at once fell into Paradise in the shape of a free library.  He was a book-worm as a child and prone to nervousness.  At six years of age he was reading Trowbridge's books for boys; at seven, Paul du Chaillu's travels, Life of Garfield, Captain Cook's Voyages; at eight, he was deep in Ouida and Washington Irving.

A well defined nomadic strain in his blood and the unrest of the pioneer spirit of his ancestors, nourished by reading and romantic speculation, led him to leave home soon after he was fifteen.  In his search for adventures amongst the scum marine population of San Francisco Bay, he soon lost his ideal romance and replaced it with the real romance of things.  He became, in turn, a salmon fisher, an oyster pirate, a schooner sailor, a fish patrolman, a longshoreman and general bay-faring adventurer.  When he was seventeen he shipped before the mast as able seaman; went to Japan, and seal hunting on the Russian side of Behring Sea, among other things, and served at divers times in forecastles.

He became possessed of an interest in sociology and economics.  Swayed partly by this and partly by the fascination of the enterprise, he tramped over the United States and Canada, many thousands of miles, and having more than one jail experience, because he possessed no fixed place of abode and no visible means of support.  Later on he repeated his vagabond career in the East End of London.

After many months of tramping, he decided that it was not all beer and skittles and returned to Oakland and went to high school and the University of California.  Breaking off college in the middle of his freshman year, he went over Chilcoot Pass with the first of the Klondike rush of 1897.  It was in the Klondike that he gathered the material for his first several books, which brought him before the reading public.  His first magazine article was published in the Overland Monthly, January, 1899.  In 1900 his first book, The Son of the Wolf, was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company.


He is a socialist and takes an active part in the propaganda of the socialist party.  At present he is living on the Piedmont Hills, overlooking San Francisco Bay.  Among his hobbies may be instanced kite flying, boat sailing and socialism.  He has a sloop-yacht on San Francisco Bay on which he does a great deal of his writing.  It was here he wrote his famous sea novel, A Sea Wolf.

In appearance, Mr. London is a man of medium stature and weight, well-muscled, and of a breezy carriage, in keeping with a delightful shipboard roll to his walk.  His smooth unshaven face is strikingly expressive, the gray-blue eyes thoughtful or impassioned by turns, the brows and chin indicative of strength and purpose, and a handsome, mobile mouth, with what some writer felicitously terms pictured corners.

London impresses one as a sailor or adventurer, not as a writer.  He is a broad-shouldered, sturdy young fellow, with light, keen gray eyes, and a square firm-set chin.


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TITLES
Experiences Tramp, Klondiker, Correspondent

The Class Struggle

Readings from The Call of the Wild, and Short Stories




E. F. Harkins, Literary World
Consider the writer's youth and his lack of schooling and his utter alienation from what is prompously spoken of as an intellectual life, and you have new proof of the fact that the artist is born, not made.  He is interested in the condition of his more humble fellow men and during a recent trip to England mingled for a couple of months with the hard pressed residents of the East End of London, and for weeks more with the hop-pickers of Kent.  Naturally he has a strong liking for out-door pastimes.  His build is sturdy, his face rugged, smooth shaven and kindly; his gray eyes express his every emotion; his manner is that of a shrewd but genial man of the world.  He is today the ablest writer of fiction in the far west.



San Francisco Call
London has been called the American Kipling.  His blunt man's strength has even been said to have out-Kiplinged Rudyard himself.  Without making any leading statements upon the question it may be said, however, that, like Kipling, London's story telling fever would out several years before it began to assume a readable form.  Again like the English author, London's first attempts at telling a tale were given to the narrow world of a school paper circulation.  Within the short space of five years Jack London has leaped into the fore-front of American novelists and by the ever increasing popularity of his books bids fair to retain the position to which he has attained.



Public Sentiment
Jack London is a genius unspoiled in the making, and the making is uncommonly stirring history—the story of a young, ardent, highly sensitive nature going forth with high courage and ideals to meet fate on equal terms.  There is no call for pathos, for such qualities reach higher, yet the heart quickens over this out-of-the-age boy who, when only nine, started in single-handed to conquer circumstance.  Fifteen years of life in its sterner phases, intrepidly met, conquered, and the lessons applied unflinchingly are basic elements of that force and poise which distinguish Mr. London.  It was character building of the heroic type, the more remarkable that, being his own godfather, literary and otherwise, he might at any moment have shirked his destiny.  Great of mind, strong-hearted, of deep conviction and deep feeling, the problems of life have stirred him profoundly, yet always toward a sound and broad philosophy.  The healthy and soulbracing sentiments of his books are realities in the man.  Whilehe must necessarily have suffered disillusion, his faith in men and motives is as fine and compelling as ever.  He has lived, and has known the shadows and the tragedies, yet they have not altered his perspective.  Out of the odds he has brought abiding faith in truth and beauty.  Simple, tender, loyal, as human as a child, a hint of diffidence and deference mingling in a singular charm of manner, with no complexities, no affectations, but a curious and unmistakable impression of power reaching through and above everything, there is something about this young man that strikes home.  You feel that here is indeed one more that counts.



San Jose, California
Normal Hall was crowded last night, its seating capacity all exhausted and standing room even at a premium, to hear Jack London's lecture on The Class Struggle, and his reading from The Call of the Wild.  And Mr. London did not disappoint his big audience.  He is a pleasing speaker, plain, direct, vigorous and convincing, with the force of dead earnest persuasiveness.  Mr. London then, with an author's full comprehension and sympathy, read from his Call of the Wild, portions of those two last chapters that are so thrilling and intense being chosen.



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