From the Road to the Pen [antikvár]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Griffith London was born in San Francisco in 1876. As a boy he insisted on being called "Jack" and stuck to it till the end of his life. His parents were poor people. So hungry was the boy that he once stole a piece of meat from a girl's lunch-basket. Jack had to help his parents earn their living by carrying newspapers both in the morning before he went to school and in the evening. Yet the boy found some time for reading. He even read at meals and on the way to and from school. At the tender age of eight he began to read tales of adventure, especially sea stories. Fond of the sea he spent much time sailing on San Francisco Bay. Jack London left school at the age of fourteen and went to work in a cannery. He hated factory work with no romance at all, borrowed 300 dollars and became an oyster pirate at the age of fifteen. In one night he earned as much as in three months at the cannery. The money, however, he squand^ed on whisky. He suddenly changed sides and accepted an offer to work for the Fish Patrol! One year later Jack made his first voyage to Korea and Japan. After his return he worked in a jute mill and then as a coal-shoveller. At that time, in 1894, Charles T. Kelly's "Industrial Army" (unemployed workers) were on their march to Washington. They started with 600 men in San Francisco. Jack, who had missed Kelly's train at Oakland, followed the army by riding on the rod under a passenger coach and on the "blind baggage". His adventures as a tramp are described in a collection of short stories entitled "The Eoad" (Abenteurer des Schienenstranges; 1907), from which we have selected four stories. That year of tramping ended in prison. He was locked up for vagrancy. There he got to know the meaning of "class justice". His experiences on the Road, his talks with men who had been used by the capitalists for their profit and then kicked into the gutter or into prison when "too old" helped him to find his own class. He joined the Socialist Labour Party and became one of its most active members. The Road was the turning point in Jack London's life. At the age of nineteen, with money borrowed from his sister, Jack London prepared for the University of California in the Oakland High