Jack London Trivia
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48 free Jack London trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Jack London trivia for book clubs, English classes and anyone who read The Call of the Wild as a kid and never quite forgot it. The quiz follows London from his birth in 1876 through oyster piracy on the bay, a sealing voyage to Japan, thirty days in a Buffalo jail for vagrancy, the Klondike Gold Rush that cost him his front teeth, and the magazine boom that made him one of the first American writers to get rich from fiction. The questions cover the books in detail - Buck, Spitz and John Thornton, the wolfdog of White Fang, Wolf Larsen and the schooner Ghost, Martin Eden and The Iron Heel - as well as London's two marriages, his war reporting in Korea, the yacht Snark, his socialist runs for mayor of Oakland, the plagiarism rows, Beauty Ranch, the burning of Wolf House and his death at forty. Easy questions come first in spirit; a few at the end will test genuine London obsessives. Every answer has been checked against a reference page, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the name of the St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd mix at the center of The Call of the Wild?
Buck
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.
Q 02Which 1906 Jack London novel follows a wolfdog's journey from the wild to domestication?
White Fang
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.
Q 03In which California city was Jack London born?
San Francisco
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.
Q 04Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney; whose surname did he take as a baby?
His stepfather's
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.
Q 05Jack London's memoir John Barleycorn, published three years before he died at 40, is about his struggle with what?
Alcohol
Alcohol was the lifelong battle the memoir describes; his doctors urged him to stop drinking, he refused, and he was dead at 40.
Q 06Which disease of poor diet did Jack London bring home from the Klondike goldfields?
Scurvy
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.
Q 07As a teenager London bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle to raid what in the bay off Oakland?
Oyster beds
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.
Q 08Virginia 'Jennie' Prentiss, a woman born into slavery, played which part in Jack London's childhood?
His wet nurse
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.
Q 09Ina Coolbrith, later California's first poet laureate, mentored the young Jack London while holding which job in Oakland?
Librarian
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.
Q 10London's first published piece, printed in a newspaper when he was 17, described which ordeal from his Pacific voyage?
A typhoon
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.
Q 11Arrested as a tramp at Niagara Falls in 1894, London served 30 days in a penitentiary in which city?
Buffalo
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.
Q 12Which Oakland bar's owner lent the young Jack London his university tuition money?
Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon
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.
Q 13Wolf Larsen of The Sea-Wolf was modelled on Alexander McLean, a real captain notorious in which trade?
Q 21Who did Jack London marry in 1905, a woman five years his senior whom he called 'Mate-Woman'?
Charmian Kittredge
Charmian Kittredge joined him on nearly every adventure, from the Pacific cruise to the ranch, and later wrote three books about their life together.
Q 22At the end of The Call of the Wild, what does the hero finally join after Thornton is killed?
A wolf pack
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.
Q 23In 1904 London went to Korea as a war correspondent to cover which conflict?
The Russo-Japanese War
Seal hunting
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.
Q 14Who is the narrator and protagonist of The Sea-Wolf, a literary critic rescued after a ferry collision?
Humphrey Van Weyden
Humphrey Van Weyden is nicknamed 'Hump' by Larsen, who forces the soft intellectual to work as cabin boy and learn to fight for himself.
Q 15What is the name of Wolf Larsen's schooner in The Sea-Wolf?
The Ghost
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.
Q 16Which magazine's $40 cheque did London say had 'literally and literarily' saved him as a young writer?
The Black Cat
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.
Q 17Which university did London enter in 1896, only to leave within a year and head for the Klondike?
UC Berkeley
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.
Q 18Which sport did London try at Waikiki in 1907 and then introduce to many American readers?
Surfing
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.'
Q 19London's struggle to get published is fictionalised in which semi-autobiographical novel?
Martin Eden
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.
Q 20Which 1900 collection of Klondike tales was Jack London's first published book?
The Son of the Wolf
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.
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.
Q 24Which Hawaiian island's leprosy settlement did London visit in 1907 and describe sympathetically for American readers?
Molokai
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.
Q 25What was the name of the yacht in which the Londons set out across the Pacific in 1907?
Snark
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.
Q 26In which Sonoma County town did London start buying the land he called Beauty Ranch in 1905?
Glen Ellen
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.
Q 27What was the name of the huge stone mansion on London's ranch that burned down before he could move in?
Wolf House
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.
Q 28What pioneering farm structure was London proud to have built first in California?
The state's first concrete silo
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.
Q 29Despite old rumours of suicide, which illness does London's death certificate blame for his death at 40?
Kidney failure
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.
Q 30Which 1908 Jack London novel imagines an oligarchy seizing power in the United States?
The Iron Heel
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.