Jack London: His Life and Work

JACK LONDON
:HIS LIFE AND
WORK.
Stories. The Novel "Martin Eden".
■ Jack London (pseudonym of John
Griffith Chaney) took his place in
American literature at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
■ Jack London’s stories were new
stories. The men in his books live a
difficult life, a life full of danger.
■ Jack London’s life was not easy.
And it was not long – he lived forty
years.
■ Jack London was born in San
Francisco, California, in 1876.
■ Like many other poor boys in California,
he found work on the ships.
■ When he came home again, Jack London
was full of a new idea. He was going to
become a writer.
■ His language was poor and it was full of
mistakes, because he did not know
grammar.
■ Jack London finished high school in three
months.
■ The magazines refused to publish his
works.
■ In 1896, when Jack London was twenty
years old, gold was discovered in Alaska.
■ He became seriously ill, and he had to come
back home to San Francisco.
■ In his memory was the whole rich world of the
Far North.
■ When he was twenty three, a small magazine
agreed to publish his stories.
■ Jack London’s stories were about men who
fought with animals and each other, who lived
for months without daylight, and then for
months without night, men who were left in
the endless snow-fields until the wolves came.
■ Jack London loved people and was sure that
the man is strong and better than anything in
the world.
 The Novel "Martin Eden"
■ Martin Eden is a 1909 novel about a young proletarian
autodidact struggling to become a writer.
■ Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute,
proletarian circumstances through an intense and
passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve
a place among the literary elite.
■ His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse.
The Morses are a bourgeois family.
■ Over a period of two years, Eden promises Ruth that
success will come, but just before it does, Ruth loses
her patience and rejects him in a letter.
■ He has already developed a grudge against publishers
and become jaded by toil and unrequited love.