50 Fun Facts About Jack London

What is the name of the St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd mix at the center of The Call of the Wild?

He starts the novel as a pampered 140-pound pet in California's Santa Clara Valley before being stolen and sold north.

Which 1906 Jack London novel follows a wolfdog's journey from the wild to domestication?

It was written as a companion and thematic mirror to The Call of the Wild, running the journey in the opposite direction.

In which California city was Jack London born?

The house near Third and Brannan Streets burned in the fire after the 1906 earthquake; a plaque marks the site.

In what year was Jack London born?

He was born John Griffith Chaney; his mother married John London later that year and the boy took his stepfather's surname.

How old was Jack London when he died in November 1916?

He died on a sleeping porch at his ranch, suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and kidney failure.

Which magazine serialized The Call of the Wild in the summer of 1903?

The magazine paid London for the story; Macmillan took the book rights and its promotional push made the novel a hit.

Which disease did London develop in the Klondike goldfields, costing him his four front teeth?

Father William Judge, 'the Saint of Dawson', ran the shelter that fed and treated London and other malnourished stampeders.

What was the name of the sloop the teenage London bought to become an oyster pirate?

He bought it from an oyster pirate called French Frank and, after it was wrecked, switched sides to join the California Fish Patrol.

Who was Virginia 'Jennie' Prentiss in Jack London's life?

London later called her his primary source of love and affection as a child, and it was Prentiss who lent him the money for his first boat.

Which Oakland librarian mentored young London and became California's first poet laureate?

London found her at the Oakland Public Library in 1886; she was also a friend of Mark Twain and Bret Harte.

In 1893 London signed on to a sealing schooner bound for the coast of Japan. What was the ship called?

The voyage produced his first published piece, 'Typhoon off the Coast of Japan', an account of the trip.

In 1894 London spent 30 days in jail for vagrancy. Where?

He was tramping east with Coxey's Army when he was picked up; the Erie County Penitentiary appears in his memoir The Road.

In which Oakland bar did the schoolboy Jack London study, its owner lending him tuition money?

The port-side bar is now unofficially called Jack London's Rendezvous, and it was where he met the sea captain who inspired Wolf Larsen.

Wolf Larsen, the amoral captain of The Sea-Wolf, was based on which real seafarer?

McLean, a Nova Scotia-born sealing captain notorious for his cruelty, was at one time the Sheriff of Nome, Alaska.

Who is the narrator and protagonist of The Sea-Wolf, a literary critic rescued after a ferry collision?

Larsen nicknames him 'Hump' and forces the soft intellectual to work as a cabin boy and learn to fight.

What is the name of Wolf Larsen's seal-hunting schooner in The Sea-Wolf?

The novel's first printing of forty thousand copies sold out before publication on the strength of The Call of the Wild.

Which magazine's $40 for 'A Thousand Deaths' did London say 'literally and literarily' saved his career?

He called it the first money he ever received for a story, and it arrived just as he was close to giving up.

How much did The Overland Monthly offer London for his early story 'To the Man On Trail'?

The tiny fee, slowly paid, nearly drove him to abandon writing altogether.

Which poet became London's best friend, addressed as 'Greek' in letters that London signed 'Wolf'?

The nickname came from Sterling's aquiline nose and classical profile; London later put him in two novels as Russ Brissenden and Mark Hall.

London's struggle to get published is fictionalised in which semi-autobiographical novel?

London said one of his motifs was an attack on individualism in the person of the hero, and complained that not a single reviewer noticed.

London married Bessie Maddern on 7 April 1900, the day his first book came out. Which book?

Both admitted publicly they married from friendship and a wish for sturdy children rather than love; the marriage lasted four years.

Who did Jack London marry in 1905, a woman five years his senior whom he called 'Mate-Woman'?

She sailed with him on his 1907 Pacific cruise and, after her death in 1955, was buried beside him under the same mossy boulder on the ranch.

With whom did London co-write The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary novel about love?

Strunsky wrote the romantic 'Dane Kempton' letters while London, as 'Herbert Wace', argued for a scientific, Darwinian view of marriage.

In 1904 London went to Korea as a war correspondent to cover which conflict?

He was arrested three times in four months by the Japanese, once for straying too close to the Manchurian border.

Whose intervention freed London after the Japanese arrested him a third time in 1904?

London had accused the assistants of stealing fodder for his horse; he left the front in June 1904.

What was the name of the yacht on which the Londons cruised to Hawaii and Australia in 1907?

The name comes from Lewis Carroll; London and his wife picked up tropical infections including yaws on the voyage.

In which Sonoma County town did London buy the 1,000-acre property he called Beauty Ranch in 1905?

He wrote that next to his wife the ranch was the dearest thing in the world to him, and it is now Jack London State Historic Park.

What was the name of the huge stone mansion on London's ranch that burned down before he could move in?

It cost him $80,000, and after his death his ashes were buried under a rock that had belonged to it.

What pioneering farm structure was London proud to have built first in California?

He studied agricultural manuals and hoped to adapt Asian sustainable farming to the US, but the ranch was an economic failure.

What cause of death appears on Jack London's death certificate?

Older sources call his death a suicide, but most biographers now agree he died of kidney failure aggravated by an accidental morphine overdose.

Which London dystopian novel of 1908 anticipated and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Both books feature a rebel who keeps a secret diary; London's manuscript is found centuries later, Winston Smith's falls to the Thought Police.

London's 1908 dystopian novel is framed by footnotes from which scholar writing around 2600 AD?

His introduction reveals from the outset that the revolutionaries' efforts will fail, giving the book an air of foreordained tragedy.

For which office did London run unsuccessfully as the Socialist candidate in 1901 and 1905?

He got 245 votes the first time and improved to 981 the second; he had joined the Socialist Labor Party at twenty.

Frank Harris claimed London's 1908 dystopian novel copied his essay and asked for what share of the royalties?

London said he had clipped the piece from a newspaper believing it to be a genuine speech by the Bishop of London.

From which young writer, later a Nobel laureate, did London buy plots and story ideas?

London admitted that for him 'expression is far easier than invention', which left him open to plagiarism charges.

The first, tame version of 'To Build a Fire' with a happy ending appeared in 1902 in which magazine?

The far bleaker 1908 rewrite, in which the unnamed man freezes to death, is the version most people know.

Roughly how many volumes were in the personal library London called 'the tools of my trade'?

He was largely self-educated and never graduated from Berkeley, leaving after a year for financial reasons.

In 1996 protests over London's racial views forced Whitehorse, Yukon, to rename 'Jack London Boulevard' to what?

London's 1904 essay 'The Yellow Peril' and his hope for a white boxer to beat Jack Johnson are the usual exhibits in the debate.

In The Call of the Wild, how much does the dog win Thornton by dragging a half-ton sled 100 yards?

Thornton uses the winnings to pay his debts and head off with partners Pete and Hans in search of a fabled Lost Cabin.

In The Call of the Wild, which vicious white husky lead dog does the hero kill to take over the team?

The rivalry builds over weeks on the trail under the French-Canadian dispatchers Francois and Perrault.

In London's 1906 wolfdog novel, which bulldog gets a throttling grip on the title character in a pit fight?

The bulldog was brought in by a faro-dealer named Tim Keenan and was the only dog ever to beat the wolfdog.

Which mining expert stops the pit fight in White Fang and buys the wolfdog from Beauty Smith?

He takes the wolfdog home to California's Santa Clara Valley, where it ends up saving his father from an escaped convict.

The Jack London Club, formed in 1918 by the Massachusetts SPCA, campaigned against what?

London had put a foreword in Jerry of the Islands and Michael, Brother of Jerry urging readers to learn how circus animals were trained; the club helped pause animal acts at Ringling-Barnum and Bailey in 1925.

London's eyewitness report of the 1906 earthquake was published in which magazine?

The quake's fire also destroyed the house where he had been born thirty years earlier.

Which Ouida novel did Jack London credit as the seed of his literary success after reading it in 1885?

He was nine when he found the long romance about an Italian peasant boy who becomes a composer.

Biographers believe Jack London's biological father, William Chaney, practised which profession?

His mother Flora Wellman worked as a music teacher and spiritualist before marrying Civil War veteran John London.

In 1894 the young London joined which protest march of the unemployed before drifting into life as a tramp?

He had just returned from a sealing voyage to Japan to find Oakland gripped by the Panic of 1893.

Which priest, 'the Saint of Dawson', ran the shelter that fed and treated London in the Klondike?

The suffering there fed straight into 'To Build a Fire', which many critics rank as his finest short story.

In which mountain range does Mount London, on the Alaska-British Columbia boundary, stand?

A lake in Russia's Magadan region and the Oakland waterfront square are also named for the writer.

Support from the Jack London Club led to a temporary halt of trained animal acts at which circus in 1925?

London's novels Jerry of the Islands and Michael, Brother of Jerry carried forewords condemning the training of circus animals.