User:Lit312/Jack London

Novels

Jack London's most famous work is The Call of the Wild. Critic Maxwell Geismar called it "a beautiful prose poem," editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn," and novelist E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece."

Nevertheless, as Dale L. Walker[1] commented:

[Jack London was] an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed.

It is often observed his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes]:

The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device... Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn... is a synoptic series of short episodes.

Even The Call of the Wild, which Walker calls a "long short story," is picaresque or episodic.

In addition to The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden are widely admired.

Ambrose Bierce called The Sea-Wolf "the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime." However, many agree with Bierce that "The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful."

The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel which anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jack London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here. Its description of the capitalist class forming an organised, totalitarian, violent oligarchy to crush the working-class forewarned in some detail the Fascist dictatorships of Europe. Given it was written in 1908, this prediction was somewhat uncanny, as Trotsky noted while commenting on the book in the 30s.

Martin Eden is a novel about a struggling young writer with a very strong resemblance to Jack London.