48 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?

Buck starts the novel as a pampered 140-pound pet in California's Santa Clara Valley, until a gardener's helper sells him north to pay gambling debts.

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

White Fang was written as a companion to The Call of the Wild and runs the journey in reverse: a wild wolfdog ends up a loyal pet on a California estate.

In which California city was Jack London born?

San Francisco was his birthplace, and thirty years later he went back as a reporter to describe the city's destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney; whose surname did he take as a baby?

His stepfather's name stuck: his mother married the Civil War veteran John London later in 1876, and the baby born John Griffith Chaney grew up as Jack London.

Jack London's memoir John Barleycorn, published three years before he died at 40, is about his struggle with what?

Alcohol was the lifelong battle the memoir describes; his doctors urged him to stop drinking, he refused, and he was dead at 40.

Which disease of poor diet did Jack London bring home from the Klondike goldfields?

Scurvy was all he brought back from the Klondike, he wrote in John Barleycorn: he came home with no gold and chewed raw potatoes to clear the last of the disease.

As a teenager London bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle to raid what in the bay off Oakland?

Oyster beds were the prize: he bought the sloop from a pirate known as French Frank, and he later switched sides to chase poachers for the California Fish Patrol.

Virginia 'Jennie' Prentiss, a woman born into slavery, played which part in Jack London's childhood?

His wet nurse became a second mother: Prentiss largely raised him, and as a teenager he borrowed the money for his sloop from the woman he called Mammy Jennie.

Ina Coolbrith, later California's first poet laureate, mentored the young Jack London while holding which job in Oakland?

Librarian at the Oakland Public Library, Coolbrith praised the ten-year-old's choice of reading, and twenty years later he wrote to thank her; she also guided a young Isadora Duncan.

London's first published piece, printed in a newspaper when he was 17, described which ordeal from his Pacific voyage?

A typhoon off the coast of Japan became his subject when his mother urged him to enter a newspaper's writing contest, and he took the $25 first prize ahead of university students.

Arrested as a tramp at Niagara Falls in 1894, London served 30 days in a penitentiary in which city?

Buffalo held the Erie County Penitentiary, where he was sent after a vagrancy hearing that he timed at about fifteen seconds a man; he described the month inside in his tramping memoir The Road.

Which Oakland bar's owner lent the young Jack London his university tuition money?

Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon has had a sloping floor since the 1906 earthquake, and owner Johnny Heinold's loan helped send London to university.

Wolf Larsen of The Sea-Wolf was modelled on Alexander McLean, a real captain notorious in which trade?

Seal hunting made McLean notorious, and London picked up the captain's story among the seamen at an Oakland waterfront saloon he had known since boyhood.

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

Humphrey Van Weyden is nicknamed 'Hump' by Larsen, who forces the soft intellectual to work as cabin boy and learn to fight for himself.

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

The Ghost washes up dismasted on a deserted island, where her blind and dying captain sabotages each repair until the narrator refits her and sails away.

Which magazine's $40 cheque did London say had 'literally and literarily' saved him as a young writer?

The Black Cat offered $40 if he would let it cut his story in half, on the very day another magazine's five-dollar offer had made him vow never to write again.

Which university did London enter in 1896, only to leave within a year and head for the Klondike?

UC Berkeley admitted him after he crammed a four-year high school course into a single year, but he left within a year and was soon on his way to the Klondike gold rush.

Which sport did London try at Waikiki in 1907 and then introduce to many American readers?

Surfing fills a chapter of his Pacific travel book titled 'A Royal Sport', where one good wave carries him 150 feet to the beach and he writes, 'From that moment I was lost.'

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

Martin Eden follows a rough sailor who educates himself into a famous author and then, sick of his own success, slips through a porthole to drown.

Which 1900 collection of Klondike tales was Jack London's first published book?

The Son of the Wolf appeared in 1900, the year he married Bess Maddern, a match both of them said rested on friendship and good breeding rather than passion.

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

Charmian Kittredge joined him on nearly every adventure, from the Pacific cruise to the ranch, and later wrote three books about their life together.

At the end of The Call of the Wild, what does the hero finally join after Thornton is killed?

A wolf pack takes him in, and the Yeehats come to fear him as an evil spirit, though each summer he returns alone to the valley where Thornton died.

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

The Russo-Japanese War took him to Korea in 1904 for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, and he went back to war reporting ten years later, in Mexico in 1914.

Which Hawaiian island's leprosy settlement did London visit in 1907 and describe sympathetically for American readers?

Molokai gave him a chapter of his Pacific travel book, in which he cheers at the patients' Fourth of July races and insists the island's fabled horrors do not exist.

What was the name of the yacht in which the Londons set out across the Pacific in 1907?

Snark is the creature hunted in Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, though London joked that he chose the name only because he could not think of any other.

In which Sonoma County town did London start buying the land he called Beauty Ranch in 1905?

Glen Ellen is where he began with 130 run-down acres in 1905 and kept buying until he owned 1,400; the ranch 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?

Wolf House was nearly finished when fire gutted it on an August night in 1913; a 1995 forensic study blamed oil-soaked rags that ignited on their own rather than arson.

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

The state's first concrete silo held shredded corn stalks to feed his dairy cows, one of many experiments on a ranch where he also copied hillside terracing he had seen in Asia.

Despite old rumours of suicide, which illness does London's death certificate blame for his death at 40?

Kidney failure, recorded as uremia, is on the certificate; he had been taking morphine for the pain, which fed decades of suicide stories that biographers such as Clarice Stasz reject.

Which 1908 Jack London novel imagines an oligarchy seizing power in the United States?

The Iron Heel is told through a manuscript found centuries later, and its picture of secret police and a crushed labour movement has often been read as an early forecast of fascism.

London's instinct-driven heroes, human and canine, place him in which literary movement?

Naturalism traces to Emile Zola and treats people as creatures of heredity and surroundings, which is why London's characters so often find themselves doomed by forces far beyond their control.

For which office did London run unsuccessfully more than once as the Socialist candidate?

Mayor of Oakland was the prize he never won; known for his open-air speeches in the city, he stood on the party ticket more than once and lost each time.

Which US president branded London a 'nature faker' over a dog fight in his 1906 wolfdog novel?

Theodore Roosevelt thought the fight's outcome absurd; London replied in an essay that a difference of opinion about fighting dogs did not make him a faker or the president a scientist.

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

Sinclair Lewis, then an unknown, mailed him plot outlines with prices attached; in October 1910 London took nine of them for $52.50 and asked him to keep sending more.

In London's story 'To Build a Fire', what puts out the blaze the freezing man has just lit?

Snow from a tree above him, shaken loose each time he pulled a twig from the brush, smothers the flames at seventy-five below zero, and the unnamed man freezes to death.

Which actor starred in the 2020 film of The Call of the Wild opposite a computer-animated dog?

Harrison Ford acted opposite a dog created by computer animation, and many critics found the digital animal distracting and unconvincing as a real dog.

In The Call of the Wild, how does the hero win a $1,600 bet for Thornton?

By hauling a half-ton sled: he breaks out a thousand pounds of flour frozen to the snow and drags it a hundred yards, and the winnings clear Thornton's debts and fund a hunt for a lost mine.

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

Spitz has to wait for his end: his first fight with the hero is cut short when scores of starving huskies raid the camp, and only a later fight to the death decides who leads the team.

What breed is Cherokee, the dog that nearly kills the hero of London's 1906 wolfdog novel in a pit fight?

Bulldog Cherokee, the first of his breed seen in the Klondike, clamps onto the wolfdog's throat and cannot be shaken off, the only dog ever to get the better of him.

In London's 1906 wolfdog novel, which mining expert stops the pit fight and buys the hero from Beauty Smith?

Weedon Scott tames the wolfdog with patience and takes it home to California, where it ends up saving his father, a judge, from an escaped convict.

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

Cruelty to trained circus animals was the target: in a foreword to Michael, Brother of Jerry, London had urged audiences to get up and leave the theatre whenever an animal act came on.

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.

London's novels The Game and The Abysmal Brute are both set in the world of which sport?

Boxing fascinated him: The Game ends with a young fighter's death in the ring, and The Abysmal Brute follows a heavyweight raised in a backwoods cabin who learns how crooked the sport is.

London's probable father, William Chaney, worked as a lawyer and journalist but made his name as what?

Astrologer is how William Chaney made his name; he was gone before the birth and never part of the boy's life, and nobody can be certain that he was the father.

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.

The Kempton-Wace Letters, which London co-wrote with Anna Strunsky, is a debate in letters about what?

Love is the subject: London wrote the letters of a young economist who argues that a sensible match beats passion, while Strunsky wrote a poet's replies in defence of romance; the book appeared in 1903.

In The Call of the Wild, the man in the red sweater beats the newly stolen hero into obedience with what?

A club meets every charge the furious dog makes, and he learns once for all that he stands no chance against a man holding one, the lesson London calls the law of the club.

Although often placed in Alaska, the Klondike goldfields London reached in 1897 lie in which part of Canada?

The Yukon became a separate Canadian territory in 1898, at the height of the rush, whose prospectors mostly landed in Alaska and then climbed the passes into Canada.