Readers seeking to learn about Jack London encounter many wide-spread myths and highly embellished accounts of his life and work in supposedly reliable sources of information such as biographies and encyclopedias. In spite of the vigorous campaign waged during the past twenty years by the late Russ Kingman, founder of the Jack London Foundation and Research Center in Glen Ellen, California, to set the record straight, the myth-making process is perpetuated, perhaps unwittingly, by readers relying on information about London that was inaccurate from the beginning.

The prevailing myths are that London was one of the most autobiographical of American writers, that he committed suicide, that he wrote obsessively about his own illegitimacy, that he was a writer of dog stories and adventure tales for adolescent boys, that he was a racist, a womanizer, an alcoholic, and a hack writer, and that he contradicted himself and was confused in his thinking about socialism, individualism, scientific materialism, and idealism.

While there is always a grain of truth in any myth, none of the above accurately describes London. Readers who reject London as a mess of contradictions should realize that he was true to his own experiences, and those who reject him as a hack writer should know that he is highly esteemed abroad as a great writer. Those who reject him for being a racist should know that he based his ideas on the most advanced scientific theories of the period. Those who reject him as an adventure-story writer for boys should know that he wrote a wide variety of prose and fiction. And those who look for parallels between his fiction and his life should look instead for his philosophy of life, that view of his own which characterizes all that he wrote and which allows us to account for his tremendous success and popularity as a writer.

Readers are always astonished to discover that, in addition to being one of the most popular and highest paid authors in America during his lifetime (1876-1916), London has been the best-selling American writer in the world. He has been translated more extensively (in over eighty languages) than any other American or English novelist of the twentieth century. Editions of his complete works abound in various major languages exclusive of English.

His largest audience resides in the world beyond the United States where his reputation as a great imaginative writer, thinker, and social critic is well established. The French literary scholar, Roger Chateauneu, identifies London as the Homer of the United States and places The Road along side of the Odyssey. Do Duc Duc, a Vietnamese writer, notes that London is called the "Gorky of the United States." Leon Trotsky, a leader in Russia's October Revolution in 1917, declared in 1937 after reading The Iron Heel that London "saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time together." It is ironic that London should be regarded more highly outside of the United States than within it.

Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin argues that "the major reason why London has been contemptuously dismissed by literary critics in America is the fact that he claimed a little too loudly that he was writing for money, thus projecting the image of a mercenary writer that did not tally with an idealized vision of a writer's vocation." She is certainly correct in observing that critics have taken at face value London's open acknowledgments that he was a "vendor of brains," that he would rather dig ditches any day than write if only it paid as well, and that he devoted two hours a day to writing and ten to farming when in fact he was a serious writer committed to his craft.

The critical response to Jack London is characterized by a lack of consensus over how to interpret the meaning as well as the theme of London's works. It appears that many readers have failed to perceive London's point of view just as Mrs. Eppingwell failed to catch Freda in "The Scorn of Women" because "there are some points of view which cannot be gained save through much travail and personal crucifixion. . . ." Presumably, London came closer to universality in his philosophy of life than did those of his critics who had not experienced the harshness of poverty, the brutality of exploitation, or the degradation of illegitimacy encountered by the young London.

Much of the critical debate over The Call of the Wild centers around interpretations of the dog, Buck. Does he represent human behavior or London's theories of animal behavior? In London's philosophy, all species must live under the same law of life, and all are subject to the same processes of evolution. In his dog stories, London exploited the idea that differences in animals and humans are merely a matter of degree and not of kind. Buck may be capable of rudimentary reason, but his real advantage over the human dwellers of modern civilization is the free reign he gives his instincts. Early reviewers wrote that The Call of the Wild signifies the appeal (and in Buck's case, the triumph) of barbarian life over civilized life. They found it a sympathetic yet unsentimental story of a dog. The range of themes discovered in it include toil and suffering, the spiritual and material conflict that rages between civilization and savagery with the savage being within us, an allegory in which people are simply the fatalistic forces in society representing the force of dishonesty, of the club, of selfishness, pettiness, cruelty, kindness, love and grief. Others interpreted it not as allegory but as a study of animal nature.

Discussions of The Sea-Wolf tend to focus on the Nietzschean notion that all human behavior could be reduced to a single principle, the will to power. Whether London meant to attack the popular misconception of Nietzsche's idea of the superman as a man of strength, virility and genius or to create in Wolf Larsen an example of the superman as anti-social, aloof, and doomed has been the subject of much debate. In a letter of November 5, 1915, to Mary Austin, London wrote, "Lots of people read The Sea-Wolf, no one discovered that it was an attack upon the superman philosophy." Some early reviewers saw this work as a tale about the initiation of an effete scion of civilization into manhood. In this view, Larsen is classified as a man absolutely devoid of moral sense and human sympathy, or as a reversion to the primordial type of the stone age and yet paradoxically possessed of a cultured mind with an appreciation of Spencer and Huxley. Apparently not all early reviewers were well enough acquainted with contemporary philosophy to accurately evaluate works reflecting ideas such as determinism, evolution, and naturalism even though they bandied these terms about in their reviews. Others dismissed The Sea-Wolf as a good tale of life on the high seas, as a conflict of man with the elements. Many found The Sea-Wolf full of excessive brutality like other stories of London's. One of the more sophisticated early reviews, the Argonaut, saw Sea-Wolf as a subtle, brilliant satire of Nietzsche's Superior Man declaring that Larsen embodies Nietzsche's ideas and is opposed by exponents of "slave morals" in persons of Van Weyden, Thomas Mugridge, and Maud Brewster. According to this view, London is illustrating a theory; the hero of the book is Larsen, not Van Weyden; and the appeal of the book is the deep, true-running instinct to side with the strong man.

London political novel The Iron Heel has been endlessly debated. Trotsky praised the "audacity" and "independence" of the book's historical foresight, and saw the novel as London's passionate effort to shake those who were lulled by routine to see what approached. London is, according to this view, bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism--of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal to their extreme expression--not lusting in violence as others imagined. Trotsky said that London had imagined the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy more fully than the revolutionary Marxists like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. He also said London is a far-sighted optimist, not a pessimist, and that he manifests remarkable freedom from reformistic and pacifist illusions. In London's picture of the future there remains no trace of democracy and peaceful progress. It is precisely the picture of fascism. In 1907 London already foresaw and described a fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution. By contrast other reviewers denied that the country could come to such an era of bloodshed and they insisted that problems could be peacefully settled. Or they belittled the work by calling Everhard a tiresome windbag and by accusing London of having a bloodthirsty imagination.

How did London react when his efforts missed fire? He told Mary Austin that he did not worry about it: "I go ahead content to be admired for my red-blood brutality and for a number of other nice little things like that which are not true of my work at all." The lack of consensus suggests that London put himself into his work along with his views and opinions of that which was not himself, like other great writers whose works continue to intrigue readers around the world.

London's place in the history of American letters has yet to be established. There may be some justification for this given that his works fit neatly into no traditional literary category and that he avowedly wrote only for money. Nevertheless, if a writer continues to give satisfaction to large numbers of people for a long enough period, it becomes impossible for critics to avoid him. London lived during a period of great social, political, industrial, and scientific change, and he recorded the contradictions of life during those times with intellectual honesty. His works are a record of his times and worthy of serious consideration.

This collection of criticism on Jack London is the first to appear in over a decade and unlike earlier collections of essays on the works of London, this volume is designed specifically to document London's critical reception in the United States from an historical perspective. The individual works that serve as foci for these critical selections represent milestones in London's career as a writer.

"To Build a Fire" is London's most widely read and often-anthologized short story. Many readers continue to think of London as a writer of thrilling adventure stories for boys although he was never satisfied to write uplifting stories with happy endings designed to please the juvenile reader of periodicals such as Youth's Companion even if they did pay their authors well. Published in Boston with a circulation of more than half a million, Youth's Companion was typically wholesome in content, intending to "warn against the ways of transgression" and to encourage "virtue and piety." On December 15, 1901, London submitted a story fitting this description to Youth's Companion and was paid $50 for it. This story, "To Build a Fire," was later rewritten by London to his own satisfaction and sold to Century Magazine for $400. This later version of "To Build a Fire," which has neither an uplifting moral nor a happy ending, is now considered by most critics to be a masterpiece of short American fiction. London initially gained fame for his Klondike tales which, like "ToBuild a Fire," Build a Fire," demonstrate his strong narration, fresh fictional subject, and ability to create atmosphere. Analyses of this story have tended to focus on the differences between the various versions of the story, especially major differences such as the dog and the man's death, on the Darwinian theme of the primitive struggle for survival, and on elements of naturalism in the tale.

A Daughter of the Snows (1902), because it is London's first novel, figures prominently in any study of the development of London's craftsmanship, style, and ideas. London himself regarded the novel as a failure because it lacked unity. Two aspects of this novel that critics have routinely faulted are its blatant Anglo-Saxon chauvinism and its improbable heroine. In a seminal review of the novel, Julian Hawthorne called the book an indictment of civilization itself. Hawthorne saw promise in London because he was a writer with hopes of reconstructing society and mankind. Hawthorne identifies the theme of the book as the attempt to draw a woman unhampered by the absurdities of modern conventions, with courage to act on her own convictions. However, he also noted that London was unaware that a thing which might actually occur in real life is not necessarily possible in fiction.

The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) are London's two best sellers which have sold millions of copies and are still widely read and discussed. The Call of the Wild was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post between June 20 and July 18, 1903, and published in book form by Macmillan in July of 1903. It was written following the summer of 1902 at which time London lived in the underworld of England's worst slum, the East End of London, where he researched and wrote The People of the Abyss (1903). London was so disgusted by the chronic conditions of misery, starvation, suffering, and the perpetual lack of shelter that he found even during a period of prosperity in England, that he declared, "If this is the best that civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery." Upon his return to the United States, London wrote The Call of the Wild in a short six weeks.

The Sea-Wolf, long recognized by many as one of the world's great sea novels, was serialized in the Century Magazine between January and November of 1904, and published in book form by Macmillan in October of 1904. London wrote much of this novel aboard his thirty-foot sloop, the Spray, while sailing up and down the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Delta. During the writing of this book, London left his wife, Bess, for Charmian Kittredge, whom he married in 1905. Discussions of this book invariably focus on the appearance of Maud Brewster half way through the book which may or may not correspond to changes in London's own life.

The Iron Heel was the 1984 of its day, and like Orwell's book, it is a dystopia. The difference is that while 1984 begins and ends with the dictatorship of "Big Brother," The Iron Heel reflects London's faith in the eventual triumph of the "Brotherhood of Man." Published by Macmillan in February of 1908, The Iron Heel was embraced by some American socialists but rejected by others because of its refusal to portray the achievement of socialism as imminent.

The Valley of the Moon, considered by some to be America's first proletarian novel, reflects a working-class point of view and advocates a life style based on a return to nature and a life on "the road" not unlike that celebrated by great American writers from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac. Serialized in Cosmopolitan between April and December of 1913, and published in book form by Macmillan in October of 1913, The Valley of the Moon is a California novel and a perfect example of London's later writings. The title refers to Sonoma County, California, which is the site of London's 1400-acre Beauty Ranch where he lived, wrote, and farmed from 1905 until his death in 1916. The novel recounts the 1350 mile four-horse wagon trip to Oregon which Jack and Charmian made in 1911, and it gives a fictional account of the Carmel colony of artists of which London was a member. London felt a desire to live simply and close to nature and he believed that all people eventually wanted to return to the soil.