Jack London was born into poverty in San Francisco in january of 1876. He was raised by his mother and stepfather in Oakland, because his dad had left sometime before he was born. By age 14, he had left school and began doing small jobs for money, such as stealing oysters or working for fish patrol. He left the United States as a sailor to Japan. When he came back, he traveled the country by hiding on trains. When he was back home, he decided to do his 4 years of high school education in one year. He went to the University of California, Berkeley for one year. He left college because of the gold rush in klondike, Alaska. He came home poor and impoverished again, and decided to settle on making a career out of writer.

His most successful work is called the call of the wild. The main character is a dog named Buck, who is forced to adapt and survive living with a pack of wolves. It follows his life and shows many different themes, including: naturalism, individualism, and survival of the fittest. Though this book is classified as a children’s book, there are a lot of ideas and themes that can be related to by adults and youth.

“the proper function of man is to live, not exist.”

“life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”

“you can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

His understanding of life should be more popular. It seems like all people really care about nowadays is the little stuff. His view was that people should go out and DO, not to wait for the good to come to you.

Jack London was and still is an inspiration to people to go outside and to have fun in life. His works show that he prioritized living a healthy and active life. His life also shows that you can come from any start and still have success in life if you are willing to go through the hard times to get there.

Personally, London has sort of shown me that though his life was full of hardship and poverty at the beginning, he found a way to fill his life with fun and joy later by trying his hardest to enjoy what was given to him. I think him and his works can be seen as a sort of gateway to living a life enveloped in nature.

London shows through his life and works what it takes to rise up and be the 1% that becomes a success. Through his life, he took countless chances and went on a ton of endeavors in order to ultimately find success by writing about what he loved. Early on, he had to persevere through poverty in the docks in Oakland, later at 14 he began to hustle to try to make some money. He dropped out of school to become a sailor and ventured out to Japan only to be put in jail for vagrancy back in the US after hitchhiking across the country on trains. But in the end he showed what it takes to end up living an adventure-filled, exciting life, which I think is what we all want.