Kirjahaku

Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: “It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” This study explores how London’s Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America’s most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and “To Build a Fire”- are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London’s key subjects—the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility—are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others.

Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: “It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” This study explores how London’s Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America’s most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and “To Build a Fire”- are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London’s key subjects—the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility—are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others.

"Jack London (1876–1916) by any standards lived a life of excess. London’s exuberant energies propelled him out of the working class to become a world-famous writer by the age of 27, after stints as a child labourer, an oyster pirate, a Pacific seaman and a convict. He wrote extensively about his travels to Japan, the Yukon, the slums of London’s East End, Korea, Hawaii and the South Seas. The author of classics such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf emerges in Kenneth K. Brandt’s new biography as a vital and flawed embodiment of conflicting yearnings. London’s writings, bolstered by their wildly clashing philosophical viewpoints derived from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, continue to engross readers with their depictions of primal urges, raw sensations and reformist politics."