TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Jack London (1876–1916)

Today we remember Jack London, one of the first American writers to achieve worldwide literary fame—and to earn a substantial fortune from his fiction alone. A pioneer of the emerging world of commercial magazine writing, London helped define modern adventure literature while also producing works of realism, political fiction, memoir, and early dystopian narrative.

London was a voracious reader from an early age. As a young man, he assembled a personal library of nearly 15,000 volumes, which he famously referred to as “the tools of my trade.” Once he broke into print, he wrote with remarkable discipline and range, producing stories set in the Klondike, the Pacific, industrial America, and imagined futures shaped by political collapse.

Did You Know?
• Jack London preserved hundreds of rejection letters—nearly 600—received before selling his first story; many survive today.

 • His novel Before Adam (1906–07), serialized in Everybody’s Magazine, explored human evolution through dreamlike prehistoric narrative—an unusual blend of science, romance, and fiction for its time.

• The Iron Heel (1908), London’s early dystopian novel, is widely considered the first modern dystopia, influencing later writers including George Orwell.

• London became the first author in the world to earn a million dollars from his writing.

• His death in 1916, from a morphine overdose at age forty, remains debated—accidental or intentional. Coincidentally, Aldous Huxley, another great dystopian novelist, died on the same date exactly 47 years later.

London’s work endures because it combines physical adventure with social conscience—stories driven not just by survival, but by questions of justice, power, and human endurance.

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