Edition |
1st edition |
Phys Descr |
xi, 777 pages ; 22 cm |
Note |
Irving Stone's Jack London originally published in 1938 under title: Sailor on horseback; the biography of Jack London |
Contents |
Book I: Jack London, sailor on horseback -- Book II: Jack London's short stories: The King of the greeks ; White and yellow ; Demetrios Contos ; The Lost poacher ; The White silence ; An Odyssey of the north ; Grit of women ; To the man on trail ; The Law of life ; The Great interrogation ; The Wisdom of the trail ; Moon-face ; The Shadow and the flash ; Amateur night ; A Relic of the Pliocene ; Semper idem ; Their alcove ; The Minions of Midas ; To build a fire ; Bātard ; The Story of Jees Uck ; The League of the old men ; Love of life ; All gold canyon ; The One thousand dozen ; The Faith of men ; The Apostate ; The Call of the wild |
Summary |
Jack London's literary executors kept a tight grip, a very tight grip indeed, on his personal papers and literary remains. They pursued this policy of secrecy with the conviction that there must be, hidden away, a skeleton in the London closet. Mr. Stone was the first individual who had free access to all of London's papers and in this book he reports that the closet held not one but three skeletons |
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Of the first skeleton, Mr. Stone writes that Jack London, born in San Francisco in 1876, was an illegitimate child, son of William H. Chaney and Flora Weilman, and that Chaney deserted the expectant mother, who married John London, a farmer and Civil War veteran, some months after the birth of her baby. The knowledge that he was illegitimate was always very disturbing to London, Mr. Stone adds, and he did his best to prevent the information from becoming public. Mr. Stone gives a lively account of London's marriages for the next skeleton in the closet. When Jack London died, in November 1916, at Glen Ellen, the world was informed that the cause was uremic poisoning. Mr. Stone gives his story of the circumstance, the third skeleton in the closet |
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These are the principal revelations that Mr. Stone offers in his biographical novel, which follows London's career from its beginning in Oakland, where he grew up as an underprivileged youngster, through hardships of one sort or another and many adventurous experiences in Alaska, the Far East, the South Pacific and the slums of Whitechapel to his eventual immense success as a writer, who earned big money with a prolific pen. He traces London's struggle to obtain an education, showing how he contrived to equip himself intellectually for a career of literary triumph, which, from the first, he felt sure would one day be his. Of formal training he had very little, at any time, and did very well without it. If ever an American writer was the product of the public library system, and his own indomitable will to learn, that writer was Jack London |
Note |
This book (or a similar edition) is available as an e-book through Open Library and/or Internet Archive |
Subject |
London, Jack, 1876-1916
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Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Biography
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Alt Author |
London, Jack, 1876-1916.
Short stories.
Selections
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Alt Title |
Sailor on horseback
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Jack London, sailor on horseback |
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Sailor on horseback |
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Jack London, his life (a biography), and selected Jack London stories
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Sailor on horseback
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Other Form |
Online version: Stone, Irving, 1903-1989. Sailor on horseback. Irving Stone's Jack London, his life, Sailor on horseback (a biography), and twenty-eight selected Jack London stories. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1977 (OCoLC)558082252 |
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Online version: Stone, Irving, 1903-1989. Sailor on horseback. Irving Stone's Jack London, his life, Sailor on horseback (a biography), and twenty-eight selected Jack London stories. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1977 (OCoLC)608300699 |
OCLC # |
2968592 |
ISBN # |
0385127979 |
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9780385127974 |
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