"The first authorized biography of a great American novelist"--

Raised in poverty as an illegitimate child, Jack London dropped out of school to support his mother, working in mind-deadening jobs that would foster a lifelong interest in socialism. Brilliant and self-taught, he haunted California's waterside bars, brawling with drunken sailors and learning about love from prostitutes. His lust for adventure took him from the beaches of Hawaii to the gold fields of Alaska, where he experienced firsthand the struggles for survival he would later immortalize in classics like White Fang and The Call of the Wild. A hard-drinking womanizer with children to support, Jack London was no stranger to passion when he met and married Charmian Kittredge, the love of his life. Despite his adventurous past, London had never before met a woman like Charmian; she adored fornication and boxing, and willingly risked life and limb to sail and explore. She typed his manuscripts while he churned out novels, serving as his inspiration and his critic. Lover, fighter, and onetime hobo, Jack London lived large and died before he was forty. This is a rare biography, from bestselling historian Alex Kershaw, that proves the truth can be more fascinating--and a far greater adventure--than a fiction.

Jack London (1876-1916) found fame with his wolf-dog tales and sagas of the frozen North, but Cecelia Tichi challenges the long-standing view of London as merely a mass-market producer of potboilers. A onetime child laborer, London led a life of poverty in the Gilded Age before rising to worldwide acclaim for stories, novels, and essays designed to hasten the social, economic, and political advance of America. In this major reinterpretation of London's career, Tichi examines how the beloved writer leveraged his written words as a force for the future. Tracing the arc of London's work from the late 1800s through the 1910s, Tichi profiles the writer's allies and adversaries in the cities, on the factory floor, inside prison walls, and in the farmlands. Thoroughly exploring London's importance as an artist and as a political and public figure, Tichi brings to life a man who merits recognition as one of America's foremost public intellectuals. This enhanced e-book edition of Jack London features significant archival motion picture footage. Eight ebook enhancements take readers into the motion-picture world of Jack London's 1900s--to the very sights that impacted his bestselling writings. Readers get front row seats to the terrifying San Francisco earthquake of 1906, to the Hawaiian beachfront where London first saw the Waikiki "surf riders," to ringside where prizefighters battled for championships. These and other historic film footage clips make this an ebook for the twenty-first century.

This is a fictional tale of Jack, the dog who was a real-life friend to Jack London during the 1897 Yukon Gold Rush and the model for Buck in his 1903 book, Call of the wild. This story imagines what might have happened when Jack was left behind by Jack London, and what adventures he might have had.

"This splendid volume does more than reinstate Jack London as a leading voice of the American cultural left. Jonah Raskin documents how London struggled to reconcile his political and his personal desires, creating memorable art but failing to save himself. One of the world's most popular writers comes alive, in all his passion and agony."—Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan "Interest in Jack London never flags. This first-rate anthology places London at the epicenter of the American radical tradition."—Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "In this well conceptualized anthology, Jonah Raskin has resurrected works that have been unavailable for decades, making The Radical Jack London a very timely presence for the twenty-first century. Raskin's own writing is forceful and engaging, and he is unblinkingly honest about London as person and as writer, never succumbing to romanticizing or whitewashing the picture of either."—H. Bruce Franklin, John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies, Rutgers University "Jack London always knew how to bang a righteous drum of social indignation, and in The Radical Jack London he can make your heart pound even today."—Paul Berman, author of Power and the Idealists and editor of Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems