JACK LONDON'S LIFE
Mitgang, Herbert
BOOKS Jack London's Life THE LETTERS OF JACK LONDON Volume One: 1896-1905 Volume Two: 1906-1912 Volume Three: 1913-1916 Edited by Earle Labor, Robert Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard Stanford...
...I am a hopelessly noncompromising revolutionist, and I shall always stand for keeping the Socialist Party rigidly revolutionary...
...When the Macmillan Company was in process of publishing the book, they sent me a letter telling me that the story was dandy, but that the title was rotten...
...you can cut out a whole piece of it, but you can't cut out parts of it, and leave mutilated pages behind you...
...Any compromise such as an affiliation with the American Federation of Labor would be at this time suicidal...
...I told them that it was the best title that I could think of, and if they wanted to change it they'd have to make up one themselves...
...London advocated his own independent brand of socialism, which included evolutionism and determinism...
...Nor did London like to see his titles changed...
...The Saturday Evening Post wrote me that it was a dandy story, but that the title was rotten...
...however, this was the only known case of his buying plots...
...In one letter to George Brett, an editor at Macmillan, London wrote: "I sold The Call of the Wild to The Saturday Evening Post...
...In his letters, London attacked critics who questioned the authenticity of his stories...
...And it was a ten-strike...
...Throughout his career, London wrote 500 nonfiction pieces in such popular magazines as Century, Cosmopolitan, and The Saturday Evening Post, almost 200 short stories, and twenty novels...
...London wrote so much, in fact, that at one point he was reduced to buying story ideas from the then-unknown Sinclair Lewis—fourteen plots for $70...
...The Letters of Jack London, more than 1,500 in all, underscore the comment by critic Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds: "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived...
...He also showed himself ahead of his time in The Iron Heel, a portrait of a future under a totalitarian dictatorship...
...To an editor of Cosmopolitan, he wrote: "I weave my stuff...
...London managed to find time to respond to novice authors who wrote to him...
...London fought constantly with editors who tried to change his language...
...It has become a phrase in the English language...
...The 1916 letter is addressed "Dear Comrades": "I am resigning from the Socialist party because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle...
...In an introduction to the French edition, Anatole France said the novel foretold the coming of fascism...
...139.50...
...I was originally a member of the old, revolutionary, up-on-its-hind-legs, fighting, Socialist Labor party...
...In a recent interview, London's literary executor, I. Milo Shepard, said: The Klondike was his Comstock Lode...
...He was also a foreign correspondent who covered the Russo-Japanese war and the Mexican war...
...His experiences were turned into popular works like The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf'' The stories were full of invention and self-mythologizing...
...1,657 pp...
...BOOKS Jack London's Life THE LETTERS OF JACK LONDON Volume One: 1896-1905 Volume Two: 1906-1912 Volume Three: 1913-1916 Edited by Earle Labor, Robert Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard Stanford University Press...
...Herbert Mitgang is cultural correspondent of The New York Times...
...Shepard, who is Jack London's nephew, was an editor of the three-volume collection of letters...
...He was one of the most prolific writers in American literary annals...
...I told them what I told The Saturday Evening Post...
...His subjects included adventure, agronomy, alcoholism, assassination, big business, ecology, gold hunting, penal reform, political corruption, prizefighting, racial exploitation, war, and writing...
...In contrast to his youthful labors when he received ten cents an hour working a ten-hour day in a California cannery, he sought and obtained top rates for his work as an author and journalist...
...In the year he died, London resigned from the Socialist Labor Party...
...In one letter, he advised, "A well-told story with a weak plot is vastly more acceptable than a poorly told story with a strong plot...
...I doubt if he knows what it is to be knocked out, to knock out another man...
...The revolution is here—stop it who can," London later wrote in a letter...
...He had his own ideas but committed himself heavily and needed still more...
...by Herbert Mitgang For the first time since Jack London died in 1916 at the age of forty, the story of his remarkable life and career emerges in his own words with the publication of hundreds of his letters that have never before seen print...
...His co-editors are Professor Earle Labor of Centenary College of Louisiana and Professor Robert Leitz III of Louisiana State University...
...London lived many of the experiences of his fictional characters...
...If the Socialist movement in the United States goes for opportunism, then it's Hurray for the Oligarchy and the Iron Heel...
...In 1905, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, and Jack London helped organize a socialist group during a meeting in Peck's Restaurant on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan...
...Behold...
...Who in the dickens are you, or any of you, to think that you can better my work...
...Failing to find a title they liked better, they actually published the book under the title The Call of the Wild...
...Depend upon me for one thing," he wrote to William English Walling, a founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and of the NAACP...
...Speaking seriously, it would mean a setback of twenty years to the movement, at least, and heaven only knows how much more serious such a catastrophe would be...
...After a reviewer for The New York Times criticized a short story he had written on boxing, titled "The Game," London wrote, "I doubt if this reviewer has had as much experience in such matters as I have...
...He was a northern Californian who stole oysters, joined Coxey's Army in its march on Washington to protest unemployment, went to •the Arctic on a sealer and to the Klondike during the gold rush of 1897-1898...
...Since the whole trend of socialism in the United States of recent years has been of peaceableness and compromise, I find that my mind refuses further sanction of my remaining a party member...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
