Jack London at 150: Three Tales That Take You Beyond the Klondike

150 years after his birth, Jack London remains a household name. Born on January 12, 1876, he became an overnight literary celebrity with The Saturday Evening Post’s publication of The Call of the Wild in 1903.

He quickly became known as much for his own real-life exploits as for his writing: He’d been an oyster pirate, a hobo, and a socialist soapbox agitator. He travelled to the Klondike and sailed the South Pacific. He marched with Coxey’s Army. He was married twice, built himself a California ranch, and got into the occasional fist fight.

Many of us first read Jack London as part of our middle school curriculum (I know I did!), but The Call of the Wild and its companion story, White Fang, left us with the impression of him as only a writer of young adult adventure stories.

Jack London wrote about more than Klondike escapades. Much more. He authored more than 50 books, including novels, collections of short stories and essays, travelogues, poetry, socialist tracts, and sociological studies. He was a war correspondent, a memoirist, an exposé writer, a ringside boxing reporter, a socialist agitator, and a serial adventurist.

To celebrate his 150th birthday, here are three stories from The Saturday Evening Post archives to re-introduce you to one of America’s foremost literary masters.

When the World Was Young

Published in the September 10, 1910, issue of The Saturday Evening Post, “When the World Was Young” tells the tale of James Ward, senior partner at a San Francisco law firm. He is visited by a man named Dave Slotter, who confesses to having visited Ward’s estate with the plan of robbing him. Slotter’s plan is interrupted, however, when he encounters “a wild man” loose on the grounds. “He don’t wear any clothes to speak of, he climbs trees like a monkey, and he runs like a deer. I saw him chasing a coyote, and the last I saw of it, by God, he was gaining on it.”

The “wild man” is James Ward himself, who is beset by two distinct personalities: one, his modern, civilized self; the other, an atavistic, primordial beast-man.

Atavism, or the reappearance of ancient traits, was a regular theme in Jack London’s writing, including The Call of the Wild. London was a voracious reader and was enthralled by recent evolutionary studies from Darwin and Spencer. He wrote several allegories about prehistoric cavemen. Even his modern characters, from businessmen to boxers, were often described as possessing primordial traits that lurked just below the veneer of modern civilization.

In “When the World was Young,” our protagonist James Ward struggles to hide his secret from those closest to him. He is only able to control his atavistic side after a climactic confrontation with a grizzly bear. Recently escaped from a nearby circus and wandering onto Ward’s property, the beast is confronted by Ward in full view of his fiancée: “Never had she dreamed so formidable and magnificent a savage lurked under the starched shirt and conventional garb of her betrothed.”

After a bloody battle, Ward manages to kill the bear with a club. Turning to his audience of gathering onlookers, he sees “the fair frail Twentieth Century girl he loved, and felt something snap in his brain.” He is at last only James Ward, wholly modern, and no longer sharing “part of his being with any vagabond anachronism from the younger world.”

The Mexican

“The Mexican” was published by The Saturday Evening Post on August 19, 1911. It is considered by many to be among his best short stories, and it weaves together two of his great passions: his rabble-rousing politics and his love of prize fighting.

It tells the story of Felipe Rivera, a young man working on behalf of the Mexican Revolution. The taciturn Rivera is a mystery to his comrades, however. He disappears for days at time, returning with fresh bruises and handfuls of cash for the Revolution. When a large order of rifles is desperately needed, Rivera promises to raise the $5,000. It is then we learn that Rivera is a prize fighter, and through flashbacks we learn he is motivated by the brutal murder of his parents by the Diaz regime. Rivera finagles himself a fight with Danny Webster, and although Rivera is not considered a major opponent, he goads Webster into making it a “winner-take-all” fight, ensuring the purse will cover the cost of the much-needed rifles.

Marshalling both his knowledge as a boxing aficionado and his ideological support of the Revolution, London commits to paper one of the most dramatic, well-articulated fights in boxing literature.

The story has long been rumored to be based on real-life boxer “Mexican” Joe Rivers. After the story’s publication, a series of newspaper articles quoted Rivers, whose real name was Jose Ybarra, accusing London of plagiarizing his life. The similarities are indeed striking. Six months prior to the publication of London’s fictional tale of Felipe Rivera fighting Danny Ward, the real-life Joe Rivers fought Danny Webster at Vernon, CA — only a few miles from London’s home. The real Rivers and the fictional Rivera both emerged victorious, and both fights ended with a stoppage caused by police interference.

“This London certainly had his impudence to put that story in that magazine,” one newspaper quoted Rivers as saying. “If I ever meet him. . . I’ll use my fists on his noodle so fast that he will see guns, thousands of them.”

As to the matter of the Mexican Revolution, there is no evidence that Rivers was involved in moving money south of the border — but who knows? Maybe Jack knew more than history could record.

John Barleycorn

Published serially in eight weekly installments by The Saturday Evening Post, from March 15 – May 3, 1913, “John Barleycorn” is a memoir. The title refers to a traditional Scottish folk song personifying barley and beer, and London’s series of personal vignettes tell of his often troubled relationship to alcohol.

London famously used his own adventures and travels as the basis for stories, so much so that he worried to a friend that he was merely “an interpreter of the things which are, rather than a creator of the things which might be.” But rarely was London so autobiographical — confessional, even — as he was in the pages of “John Barleycorn.”

From his first sip of beer at age five through his years as an oyster pirate, a hobo, a miner, and finally, a writer, London recounts his many drinks – not in celebration, but in rebuke: “From the standpoint of palate and stomach,” he wrote, “alcohol was, as it had always been, repulsive.”

Yet he drank. And he drank a lot. He maintains that he never drank from an innate or chemical need, but from a social one. “Romance and Adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with John Barleycorn. To know the two, I must know the third.”

He describes the highs and lows of the drinking life: the reveries and ecstasies, the melancholy and depression — and even one suicidal night (“uppermost in my thought — my revolver, the crashing eternal darkness of a bullet”). London’s liquid memoir also contains one of the earliest references to the hallucination of “pink elephants,” a still-common symbol for the too-sodden brain.

Yet by the end of his free-flowing tale, he declares his intent is not to quit drinking entirely. Imbibing was too-much embedded in the fabric of his social life, he believed, and nothing short of prohibition would put a stop to that conviviality.

“No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion.”

Alternating in shades of pathos and bathos, “John Barleycorn” is a rare and self-piercing look into the reality of the man we thought we knew through his fictions, a fragile adventurer, by turns humble and boastful, but always a wicked storyteller.