Jack London
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STORY BY Jack London
Smoke Bellew
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Smoke Bellew by Jack London. A sweeping adventure saga in the tradition of "White Fang and "The Call of the Wild, bringing to vivid life the cold, bleak, unforgiving Alaskan wilderness and the colorful, desperately uncertain lives of both natives and intruders. On a lark, the novel's hero, Christopher Bellew, a San Francisco newspaperman and dandy, sets off on what he believes will be a brief trek into the Klondike to cover the latest gold rush. The lark turns into a rough, raw adventure that transforms the young chekako (tenderfoot) into a tough, hardened survivor.
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The Iron Heel
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The Iron Heel by Jack London. Set in the future, “The Iron Heel” describes a world in which the division between the classes has deepened, creating a powerful Oligarchy that retains control through terror. A manuscript by rebel Avis Everhard is recovered in an even more distant future, and analyzed by scholar Anthony Meredith. Published in 1908, Jack London’s multi-layered narrative is an early example of the dystopian novel, and its vision of the future proved to be eerily prescient of the violence and fascism that marked the initial half of the 20th century.
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The Little Lady of the Big House
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The Little Lady of the Big House by Jack London. The story concerns a love triangle. The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is a rancher with a poetic streak (his "acorn song" recalls London's play, "The Acorn Planters"). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious, athletic, and sexually self-aware woman, who falls in love with Evan Graham, an old friend of her husband. Unable to choose between the two men, she wounds herself mortally with a rifle in what her husband is certain is a suicide. It was Jack Londons last novel to be published during his lifetime.
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South Sea Tales
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South Sea Tales by Jack London. Like the celebrated Klondike Tales, the stories that comprise South Sea Tales derive their intensity from the author’s own far-flung adventures, conveying an impassioned, unsparing vision borne only of experience. The powerful tales gathered here vividly evoke the turn-of-the-century colonial Pacific and its capricious tropical landscape, while also trenchantly observing the delicate interplay between imperialism and the exotic.
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Michael' Brother of Jerry
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Michael Brother of Jerry by Jack London. Michael, an Irish terrier, was born and raised in the Solomon Islands. The dog now works as a slave hunter aboard a schooner on a mission to recruit native islanders for work. One day the captain accidentally leaves Michael on a beach and sails away. Michael is then abducted by Dag Daughtry, a steward on another ship, who initially planned to sell the dog for money. However, later he got attached to Michael and takes the dog to a trip around the world.
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The Sea Wolf
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The Sea Wolf by Jack London. Hailed by critics as one of the greatest sea stories ever written, this rousing adventure offers a fascinating combination of gritty realism and sublime lyricism in its portrayal of an elemental conflict. Jack London began his career at sea, and his shipboard experiences imbue The Sea-Wolf with flavorful authenticity. In the story, the gentleman narrator, Humphrey Van Weyden, is pitted against an amoral sea captain, Wolf Larsen, in a clash of idealism with materialism. The novel begins when Van Weyden is swept overboard into San Francisco Bay, and plucked from the sea by Larsen's seal-hunting vessel, the Ghost. Pressed into service as a cabin boy by the ruthless captain, Van Weyden becomes an unwilling participant in a brutal shipboard drama. Larsen's increasingly violent abuse of the crew fuels a mounting tension that ultimately boils into mutiny, shipwreck, and a desperate confrontation. Read and loved around the world, this 1904 maritime classic has influenced such writers as Hemingway, Orwell, and Kerouac.
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The Star Rover
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The Star Rover by Jack London. A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.
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Hearts of Three
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Hearts of Three by Jack London. One of Jack London's last books, Hearts of Three was released in the New York Journal in 1920, four years after his death. It is an action-packed adventure novel about discovering treasure in foreign lands. A descendant of the pirate Henry Morgan, Francis Morgan overcomes great obstacles in the jungle to find the treasure, only to return to New York to find his family's fortune threatened-a real Indiana Jones years before his time.
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Adventure
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Adventure by Jack London. Adventure is a novel by Jack London released in 1911 by The Macmillan Company. The novel explores the themes of domination of one people over the others, the differences between races, emancipation of women, and the strength of the human spirit, strengthened in a struggle with the nature and society.
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The Turtles of Tasman
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The Turtles of Tasman by Jack London. Published in 1916, this is a collection of very different short stories. There are tales of murder as well as a play set in prehistoric times. “Finis” and “The End of the Story” are classic Jack London Klondike tales of adventure on the trail. “Told in the Drooling Ward” is an often-irreverent look at life in a California mental institution.
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