Struggle defined Jack London’s life and fiction. Born in San Francisco on this date in 1876, he was most likely illegitimate, and endured a haphazard childhood. At thirteen, he had to work twelve-hour shifts at a local cannery for ten cents an hour, a harsh introduction to human greed and exploitation. He left that unpromising career two years later to become an oyster pirate, but eventually turned his talents and experience to the other side of the law working for the California Fish Patrol.

Later, he sailed on a seal-hunting expedition in the north Pacific. Other odd jobs included working in a textile mill and shoveling coal at a power plant. Seeking adventure, he rode the rails as a hobo, got himself thrown in jail for vagrancy, and made his way to Alaska to pan for gold.

However, his natural literary talents rose to the surface early on, as he demonstrated when he won a twenty-five dollar prize from the San Francisco Morning Call for an essay about a typhoon he witnessed in the Pacific. The notebooks he kept during his ill-fated search for gold along the Yukon provided the raw material for his most successful works, including the novels White Fang and The Call of the Wild, as well as notable short stories, such as “To Build a Fire.”

Literary success did not end his taste for adventure. He worked as a war correspondent for William Randolph Hearst during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. London got so close to the action that the Japanese arrested him on three separate occasions, the last for assaulting his Japanese assistants, whom he accused of stealing. It took the personal intervention of Teddy Roosevelt to get him released.

London’s hard life and determination to survive and succeed made him an avid adherent of two significant crusades of the early 20th century, Social Darwinism and the labor movement. He viewed both as intrinsically connected. London embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution as not only a justification for class struggle, but as a guide to both individual and social renewal.

The cruel exploitation he endured as a child laborer motivated him to right that wrong through agitation, including pro-worker political advocacy and labor strikes. He believed Darwin’s theories of natural selection provided the scientific framework for such action. Conflict, said London, was not an aberration of nature, but its central, enduring truth. In his book-length polemic The War of the Classes, London stated:

To London, such struggle was not only natural, but a necessary component of personal fulfillment. And more – he believed that confronting challenges instilled in the individual a sense of purpose which could rescue him from modern aimlessness. London agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche, who condemned modern society for abandoning the “aristocratic” values of confidence and strength for the “slave” values of humility and piety. In a letter to his fiancé, London declared:

I liked [the works of Nietzsche]… which just happened to fill a need and accomplished more than any tonic to clear my surcharged mental atmosphere and set my feet on the road to recovery.

In London’s semiautobiographical novel Martin Eden, the protagonist says:

Nietzsche was right. The world belongs to the strong—the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade and exchange.

In other novels, London asserted that the “road to recovery” must, at some point, require physical struggle. In both The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf, the protagonist at the beginning of the story lives a sheltered, stale life, but through the exercise of will and courage, discovers and asserts his inner nobility and strength.

But what is the source of that strength? London believed the potential for nobility lay in one’s ancestry. London’s take on Darwinian evolution was that every living being has within them generations of fighters and winners. Modern decadence may hide that strength, but it is there, deep within, a legacy that is the core of one’s being.

Commune with your ancestors, said London, and their strength becomes yours.

Buck, the canine protagonist of The Call of the Wild, lives a pampered existence as a pet until he is kidnapped and transported to the severe and unforgiving Yukon wilderness, where he eventually discovers his inner wolf:

In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. 

In The Sea Wolf, literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden survives a shipwreck, but must toughen up to survive the cruelty of Wolf Larsen and his roughneck crew. Like Buck, he not only survives, but manages to outfight his tormenters and rise through the ranks to a position of leadership. He even wins the heart of Maud Brewster, another shipwreck victim. Van Weyden reluctantly acknowledges that his newfound zest for life is a gift from Wolf Larsen. More important, Van Weyden realizes the strength to resist and win is a legacy of his ancestors:

The youth of the race seemed burgeoning in me, overcivilized man that I was, and I lived for myself the old hunting days and forest nights of my remote and forgotten ancestry. I had much for which to thank Wolf Larsen, was my thought as we went along the path.

Jack London took direct aim at the ennui of modern life, knowing that beings sculpted by toil and tragedy were not meant for luxury. The road to recovery, he believed, began with the rediscovery of the primitive, the physical, the real.

M. C. Tuggle lives and writes in Charlotte, NC. His science fiction, fantasy, and mystery stories have been featured in several publications, including Mystery Weekly Magazine, Hexagon Speculative Fiction, and Metaphorosis. The Novel Fox released his novella Aztec Midnight in March, 2016, a fantasy adventure based on his extended stay in a Mexican village.

He blogs on all things literary at mctuggle.com.