Jack London

Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876, the illegitimate son of a poor family, and as a boy worked in a cannery and a jute mill, often more than ten hours a day. At fifteen he borrowed money to buy a sloop and raided oyster beds in San Francisco Bay, becoming known as 'the prince of the oyster pirates', then switched sides to join the fish patrol. At seventeen he sailed on a sealing schooner to the Sea of Japan and the Bering Sea, then rode the rails across America as a hobo and spent a month in jail for vagrancy. Back home he threw himself into study and entered the University of California, but poverty forced him to leave after one semester. In 1897 he joined the Klondike Gold Rush and spent a winter in the Yukon; he found no gold, but brought back a wealth of material. He went on to become one of the highest-paid writers in America, wrote more than fifty books, and died at forty.