A forty-dollar magazine sale kept London from quitting writing
After The Overland Monthly offered Jack London only five dollars—and paid slowly—for "To the Man On Trail," he nearly abandoned authorship. The Black Cat then bought "A Thousand Deaths" for forty dollars, money he later called the rescue of his career "literally and literarily."
Born John Griffith Chaney on 12 January 1876 in San Francisco, London was likely the son of astrologer William Chaney, who—per Flora Wellman's June 1875 Chronicle account—demanded an abortion, then denied the child until she shot herself without fatal injury. Wet nurse Virginia Prentiss, a formerly enslaved neighbor, became his chief childhood source of affection; late in 1876 Flora married Civil War veteran John London. Self-educated after Ouida's Signa (1885) and encouragement from librarian Ina Coolbrith, he worked Hickmott's Cannery twelve to eighteen hours a day, oyster-pirated on the Razzle-Dazzle, sailed the Sophie Sutherland to Japan, tramped with Coxey's Army, and served thirty days for vagrancy in Buffalo's Erie County Penitentiary in 1894.
Berkeley admission in 1896 ended in 1897 for lack of money—the same year he read Chaney's denying letter and left for the Klondike with his sister's husband on 12 July. Scurvy cost him four front teeth and lasting hip and face pain; Father William Judge's Dawson shelter helped him survive experiences that fed "To Build a Fire." Returning a socialist determined to "sell his brains," he treated writing as a business. Magazine technology's boom let him earn 2,500 dollars in 1900—about 97,000 in later currency. Early in 1903 The Saturday Evening Post paid 750 dollars for The Call of the Wild; Macmillan's campaign made the Klondike dog story a hit beside White Fang and South Seas tales.
He joined San Francisco's radical "Crowd," championed animal welfare and workers' rights, and stocked a 15,000-volume personal library he called tools of the trade. Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon—where bartender John Heinold once lent tuition money—supplied models such as cruel captain Alexander McLean, seed of Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf. London died 22 November 1916, already an international celebrity who had shown commercial fiction could mint both fortune and reformist heat.
Source: Jack London
