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PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
TALES OF THE PACIFIC
Jack London – his real name was John Griffith London – had a wild and colourful youth on the waterfront of San Francisco, his native city. Born in 1876, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a cannery. By the time he was sixteen he had been both an oyster pirate and a member of the Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay and he later wrote about his experiences in The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). In 1893 he joined a sealing cruise which took him as far as Japan. Returning to the United States, he travelled throughout the country. He was determined to become a writer and read voraciously. After a brief period of study at the University of California he joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897. He returned to San Francisco the following year and wrote about his experiences. His short stories of the Yukon were published in Overland Monthly (1898) and the Atlantic Monthly (1899), and in 1900 his first collection, The Son of the Wolf, appeared, bringing him national fame. In 1902 he went to London, where he studied the slum conditions of the East End. He wrote about his experiences in The People of the Abyss (1903). His life was exciting and eventful. There were sailing voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas. He reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers and gave lecture tours.
A prolific writer, he published an enormous number of stories and novels. Besides several collections of short stories, including
Love of Life (1907),
Lost Face (1910), and
On the Makaloa Mat (1919), he wrote many novels, including
The Call of the Wild (1903),
The Sea-Wolf (1904),
The Game (1905),
White Fang (1906),
Martin Eden (1909),
John Barleycorn (1913) and
Jerry of the Islands (1917). Jack London died in 1916, at his home in California.
Andrew Sinclair was born in 1935 and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote his first two novels, The Breaking of Bumbo and My Friend Judas. His major trilogy of novels is Gog (1967), Magog (1972) and King Ludd (1988). He has also written Prohibition: the Era of Excess and The Better Half: the Emancipation of the American Woman, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, as well as several biographies, his subjects including Jack London, J. P. Morgan, John Ford, Sam Spiegel and The Other Victoria, the Empress of Germany. His more recent books include The Need to Give (1990) and The Far Corners of the Earth (1991). He has also edited a further collection of stories by Jack London for Penguin Classics, entitled The Sea-Wolf and Other Stories. He frequently appears on television and radio as a critic and is a fellow of the Royal Literary Society and of the Society of American Historians.
JACK LONDON
TALES OF THE PACIFIC
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INTRODUCTION AND AFTERWORD BY
ANDREW SINCLAIR
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PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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