Jack London
1876–1916 · United States
he lived every page before he wrote it
London was born in San Francisco in 1876, poor and illegitimate, and educated himself at the Oakland public library. By fifteen he was an oyster pirate raiding the beds of San Francisco Bay; at seventeen he sailed to Japan on a sealing schooner; at eighteen he was tramping across the United States and was jailed for a month for vagrancy at Niagara Falls. The Klondike gold rush took him north in 1897. He came back with scurvy and no gold, and with the material for everything that followed.
He wrote a thousand words a day, without exception, and turned that discipline into the first great commercial career in American letters — the highest-paid and most widely read writer of his time, translated everywhere, rich enough to build a ranch in Sonoma and sail the Pacific in a boat he designed himself.
He died in 1916 at forty, and the cause is genuinely disputed. His death certificate recorded uremia; he had advanced kidney disease and had been taking morphine for the pain. Whether the final dose was an accident has never been settled, and the confident story of suicide, repeated for decades, rests on very little.