Mister Razzle Dazzle Turns 150
Happy Birthday to Jack London, Fugitive Father of California Literature and Inventor of the Road Novel
Socialist, white supremacist, tramp, shirtless billboard model
If you haven’t read ‘Martin Eden,’ get thee to a library
Unlike his predecessors in the field of California literature — Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris — Jack London was born in San Francisco. 1876, the year of his birth, was also the anniversary of the centenary of the United States, the nation to which he owed his unalloyed allegiance. His mother, Flora Wellman, a spiritualist and an unwed mother, thought she could communicate with the dead. I’d call her a bohemian or a proto-hippie. As a young man, Jack London traveled widely in Asia and Europe, and across both North and South America. And while he wrote about England, Japan, Mexico, the Yukon, and elsewhere, he lived most of his life around San Francisco Bay: in Oakland, Berkeley, and in Glen Ellen, too, as well as in the city of San Francisco itself. The famed author’s name at birth was not Jack London, but John Griffith Chaney. When his mother married a wounded Civil War veteran named John London, John Griffith Chaney became John London. His mother entrusted him to a …
