- is a representan of american prose that worked at the beginning of our century. He wrote under influence of hopeful socializm of Marx on the one hand and the rather darker views of Nietze and Darwinism on the other. That is, London believed at the same time in the necessary triumph of the working class and in the evoluntary necessity of the survival of the strongest individuals. The contradiction between these competing beliefs is most vividly projected in the patently autobiographical novel MARTIN EDEN. It is a central document for the London scholar.

London was born as the illegitimate son of Mr. Chaney. He was talented and self-taugh man who became an astrologer and his wife was an eccentric woman from a wealthy Ohio family who both a spiritualist and music teacher. London never saw his real parents and so he took the name after his stepfather. He grew up in extreme poverty. As very young man he supported himsel for menial and dangerous jobs - he was figting for surviving. This struggle for survival many other writers knew only from observation or books. And that is why is his work so realistic - he was writing his real experiences and each terrible description or story he had felt on his own skill at first and only that he wrote about it. By the time he was teenager he had worked on cannery, as seaman and coal shoveler. After crossing much of the continent as a member of COXEYS ARMY (an organized group of unemployed) he was jailed for thirty days for vagrancy. At this point he determined to educate himself in order to improve his own condition. He was very clever so with an intellectual energy he quckly completed high school and spent a semester as a special student at the University of California. London have been writing sporadically for five years but his professional career began only after he spent the winter in the Clondike searching for gold. Within two years by the time he published his first collection of the novels THE SON OF THE WOLF and he was on his way to become the highest paid author of his time. By his 27th birthday THE CALL OF THE WILD made him rich. What I found very interesting on his work is the fact that he frankly disliked his profession. But he was also a careful craftsman who produced a minimum of lOOO publishable words a day siw days a week. He wrote on many subjects from astral projection to warfare.