Jack London (1876-1916), the famous American novelist was born in San Francisco. He grew up on the waterfront of Oakland and his schooling was intermittent. He enrolled in the University of California in 1897, but dropped out after one semester. He continued his education on his own, reading intensively. In 1897 he joined the Klondike gold rush. Since 1898 J. London began to write about his various experiences. His early stories were collected in 1900 in a volume entitled The Son of the Wolf. His best novel Martin Eden (1909), more auto-biographical than any of London's work, is concerned with his attempt to become a successful writer, and then to come to terms with that success. He traveled a lot, but being very celebrated and rich he was an unhappy man who could not reconcile his own success with the things he had seen and endured. He died at the age of 40, perhaps a suicide. . .
