After a few months, his sloop became damaged beyond repair.
In his memoir, John Barleycorn, he claims also to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie. Seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. (She later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community). In 1886, he went to the Oakland Public Library and found a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who encouraged his learning. He credited this as the seed of his literary success. In 1885, London found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa. Although the family was working class, it was not as impoverished as London's later accounts claimed. The house burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the California Historical Society placed a plaque at the site in 1953. London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. London at the age of nine with his dog Rollo, 1885 London was devastated by his father's letter in the months following, he quit school at Berkeley and went to the Klondike during the gold rush boom. Chaney concluded by saying that he was more to be pitied than London. Chaney responded that he could not be London's father because he was impotent he casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted on an abortion. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. The Prentiss family moved with the Londons, and remained a stable source of care for the young Jack. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London completed public grade school. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby John, later known as Jack, to live with the newly married couple. Prentiss was an important maternal figure throughout London's life, and he would later refer to her as his primary source of love and affection as a child. After giving birth, Flora sent the baby for wet-nursing to Virginia (Jennie) Prentiss, a formerly enslaved African-American woman and a neighbor. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. When she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. Īccording to Flora Wellman's account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to London's mother Flora Wellman as having been "his wife" he also cites an advertisement in which Flora called herself "Florence Wellman Chaney". Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown. Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. īiographer Clarice Stasz and others believe London's father was astrologer William Chaney. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist, claiming to channel the spirit of a Sauk chief, Black Hawk. Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay", and " The Heathen".įlora and John London, Jack's mother and stepfather His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories " To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He 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. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, workers' rights, socialism, and eugenics. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. 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. John Griffith London (born John Griffith Chaney Janu– November 22, 1916) was an American novelist, journalist and social activist.