Travel, work and literary success
London was born in San Francisco in 1876. He worked in California, went to sea as a young man and joined the Klondike gold rush in 1897. On returning home he built a career through stories and journalism. The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, brought him a wide readership.
Success supported further travel and ambitious projects. With his second wife, Charmian, he sailed into the Pacific aboard the Snark before illness forced them home. At his ranch near Glen Ellen he experimented with farming while maintaining a demanding writing schedule. He also lectured on socialism and reported on war. He died at the ranch in 1916, aged forty.
Two voices speaking beyond confinement
In The Scarlet Plague an old man tells children about the civilisation destroyed by an epidemic. Their world has so thoroughly changed that his memories have become difficult to explain. Gordon Grant illustrates the 1915 Macmillan edition held here. The Star Rover gives Darrell Standing a different kind of distance from ordinary life. Confined and brutalised in prison, he narrates experiences of other times and selves. Lumitheca’s copy bears the British title The Jacket, with The Star Rover identified as its American title. Both novels place an insistent storyteller before listeners asked to imagine a world beyond their own.
