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John Griffith "Jack" London was born John Griffith Cheney on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. His parents, William Henrey Cheney and Flora Wellman, split up when Flora refused William's wish to have the pregnancy aborted. After the child's birth the doctor ordered that the London be raised by former slave Virginia "Mammy Jennie" Prentiss, an arrangement that lasted until his mother married John London on September 7, 1876. Brought back into the household and renamed John Griffith London, he spent his childhood moving around California with his family and immersing himself in reading. He graduated from Cole Grammar School in 1891 and was forced by his family's poverty to enter the workforce with only an eighth grade education. For the next four years London struggled to find his financial footing, working at a cannery, poaching oysters from the California coast, serving on the California Fish Patrol, laboring at a jute mill, and shoveling coal for a power plant.

In 1895 London decided to complete his education and enrolled at Oakland High School where he also worked as a janitor. After completing his secondary education, London attended the University of California at Berkeley but dropped out after only one semester when he found out that John London was not his biological father. After an unsuccessful attempt at publishing his writings and an arduous job at a laundry, London left with his brother-in-law, Captain James Shepard, for the Alaskan Klondike where he hoped to strike it rich. After a year-long, difficult, and terribly cold foray into Alaska's interior, London managed to find just $4.50 worth of gold dust and a bad case of scurvy. But less tangible and infinitely more valuable were the people he met and the experiences he had while living on the Last Frontier; these stories would be what propelled London to the forefront of American literature.

Upon his return from Alaska, London rededicated his efforts to writing. Between August 1898 and May 1900, he submitted 103 works to publishers, only twenty-four of which were accepted. Among these was An Odyssey of the North published in Atlantic Monthly in 1899, a story from his time in Alaska. It drew the attention of Houghton Mifflin who offered to publish a book of London's Alaska experiences. The book, The Son of the Wolf, was published on April 7, 1900, the same day London married his high school math tutor, Elizabeth Mae "Bessie" Maddern. The relationship was not for love, but for utility; London wedded Elizabeth mainly so she could have his children. While the union with Elizabeth gave him two daughters, London's heart was with friend and collaborator Anna Strunsky, his co-writer in The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903). With this novel and four others to his name, London composed his masterpiece, The Call of the Wild in 1903. He followed this wildly successful novel with two more noteworthy works, The Sea-Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1906). Meanwhile, London's heart was once again wondering, this time to his long-time friend Charmian Kittridge. He divorced Bessie on November 18, 1905, and married Charmian the next day. Though London was by all accounts content with his new bride, he fell into a depression caused by alienation from his own success. He continued to work tirelessly on his writing, but was never able to produce anything that matched the success of his earlier works. Broken by personal despair, two unsuccessful attempts to have children with Charmian, the destruction of his California dream home, and slow kidney failure from years of alcohol abuse, London died on November 22, 1916, at age forty.