Jack London
American
1876 – 1916
Jack London was an American writer who joined the Klondike stampede in 1897 at age 21. He found little gold but returned with the raw material for The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and the stories that made him one of the world's most famous authors.
Biography
Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. Raised in working-class Oakland, he had already been an oyster pirate, a sailor, a hobo, and a cannery hand when news of the Klondike strike reached California in July 1897. Twenty-one years old, he sailed north within weeks, packed his outfit over the Chilkoot Pass, and boated down the Yukon River as winter closed in.
London spent the winter of 1897–98 in a cabin on Henderson Creek, near the mouth of the Stewart River south of Dawson City. He staked a claim but mined little gold; instead he absorbed the talk of trappers, prospectors, and Indigenous northerners around the stove. Scurvy forced him out in the summer of 1898, and he returned to California broke, having reportedly taken out only a few dollars in dust.
The Klondike, however, made his fortune. Drawing on that single year in the North, London wrote the stories and novels that made him famous: The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and 'To Build a Fire' (1908), among many others. He became one of the first American authors to win international celebrity and real wealth from writing, producing more than fifty books before his death at his ranch in Glen Ellen, California, on November 22, 1916, at just 40. His Klondike fiction remains the lens through which millions imagine the gold rush.