Jack London
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Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing.
Jack London's most famous novels are The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden.
Critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild "a beautiful prose poem," editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn," and novelist E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable … his masterpiece."
Nevertheless, as Dale L. Walker commented:
Jack London was an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.
It is often observed his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes:
The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device … Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn … is a synoptic series of short episodes.
Even The Call of the Wild, which Walker calls a "long short story", is picaresque or episodic.
Ambrose Bierce said of The Sea-Wolf that "the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen … the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime." However, he noted, "The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful."
The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel which anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jack London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here.
Martin Eden is a novel about a struggling young writer.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_london
