The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution

by Jack London, Jonah Raskin (Introduction)

"Big things are happening secretly all around," says Jack London's prescient hero Ernest Everhard in the 1908 novel The Iron Heel, excerpted in this timely anthology of London's writings about war and revolution. Besides illuminating his surprising literary range, The Radical Jack London establishes the iconic American author as both a product of his own era and a significant voice for ours. The book features works by London that have been unavailable for decades. In his insightful introduction, editor Jonah Raskin lays out the social, economic, and political contexts for London's polemical writings and shows London to be America's leading revolutionary writer at the turn of the twentieth century.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Politics

300 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2008

About the author

John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.

His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen".

Reviews

[Josh Wade · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a huge fan of London's fiction I expected more from the few non-fiction selections in the book. They were a bit shallow in my opinion. I would imagine the socialist writings, with their optimistic niavete to be typical of the time period I skipped a couple of the book excerpts simply because I would rather read the work in full than just a chapter out of context. I'm giving it 3 stars based on the few short stories and a small glimpse into his early socialist thought.

[Jacob Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays about London's writing are passable. The best part of this book is the hard to get writings from way back. War correspondences and serialized stories. Didn't much go for the chapter excerpts, best to just read the whole novels.

[Andrew M Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkably astute, politically, if a tad weighty.