London Jack - John Barleycorn: alcoholic memoirs

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

JOHN BARLEYCORN

JACK LONDON was born in San Francisco in 1876. Reared by a family without fixed occupation or residence, he lived along the Oakland waterfront described in Martin Eden (1909) and John Barleycorn (1913). As a boy he bought a sloop and set up as an oyster pirate in San Francisco bay, as later told in the Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). After work on a sealing schooner, a tramping trip through the US and Canada, and a period of education including a semester at the University of California, he returned to the Oakland waterfront with an interest in sociology and the Socialist party. In 1897 he joined the gold rush to the Klondike, but his attempt at mining was unsuccessful, and stricken with scurvy he returned to Oakland the following year and began to write of his experiences. In 1900 his first collection of short stories, The Son of the Wolf, was issued, bringing him national fame for his portrayal of the vigorous, brutal life of the Far North. Continuing to write in this vein, he produced a prolific output of stories and novels, including The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), and White Fang (1906). In 1902 he went to London, where he made a study of slum conditions for his descriptive work The People of the Abyss (1903). The remainder of his short but full life was spent under the heady influence of popularity and success. He travelled as a war correspondent, made lecture tours, went on sailing voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas, and lived on his great patriarchal estate, Beauty Ranch, in California. He died in 1916, having suffered chronic ill health for a number of years.

JOHN SUTHERLAND is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. He is the author of a number of books, among them Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?, and Henry V, War Criminal? and other Shakespeare Puzzles (with Cedric Watts). He has also edited Jack Londons The Sea-Wolf for Oxford Worlds Classics, as well as Vanity Fair and Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, and The Way We Live Now and other novels by Anthony Trollope.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

JACK LONDON

Alcoholic Memoirs

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JOHN SUTHERLAND

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Editorial matter John Sutherland 1989

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Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

John Barleycorn first published 1913
First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1989
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

London, Jack, 18761916.
John Barleycorn: Alcoholic memoirs/Jack London; edited with an
introduction by John Sutherland.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
First published 1913; first published as a Worlds classics
paperback 1989.
1. London, Jack, 18761916Biography. 2. Authors. American
20th centuryBiography.
3. AlcoholicsUnited StatesBiography.
I. Sutherland, John, 1938. II. Title. III. Series. 8931677
PS3523.046Z467 1989 818.5209dc20
ISBN 0192837176

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

IN 1912 Jack London was Americas best-known under 40-year-old. Hollywood had not yet become our Hollywood, but Jack was recognizably a star and a living legend. His rugged good looks and cocked Irish chin were as well known as Theodore Roosevelts belligerent squint. (Like Roosevelt, London had a love affair with the camera. Among his literary remains at the Huntington Library are hundreds of photographs, many of himself). For his admiring contemporaries Jack London embodied the irresistible power of American youth. He was Herbert Spencers social Darwinism incarnate, an overman, a Carlylean hero, a Horatio Alger success story, a champ.

Born into an irregular marriage, the son of a vagabond astrologer and a failed boarding-house keeper in Oakland, California, Jack was a main support of his family at 10 years old, getting up at three in the morning to deliver newspapers. He left school at 14. By 15, he was the Prince of the oyster Pirates, poaching in the shallow waters off San Mateo. Before he was 18, Jack had sailed the Siberian waters as a seal hunter; he later plodded over the Klondike snows as a goldminer. In the interim he was one of the enlisted unemployed in Jacob S. Coxeys army as it marched on Washington demanding a new deal. He deserted from Coxeys ranks (inevitably, given his freebooting nature) to ride the rods, hop freight cars and generally hobo all over the northern American continent. He served time in Erie County Penitentiary (he had been to see the Niagara Falls by moonlightthe true London touch). He then returned to enroll in high school. Two years later he entered Berkeley from where, anticipating his hippy successors, he dropped out after one semester. Before he was 30, London had made a reputation as the most intrepid of international correspondents, reporting to the American people from the abyss of Londons East End slums and the Russo-Japanese War. Lesser men would have stopped in their careers at any one of these points; but for London it was ever forward on what he called the Adventure Path of life.