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BIO

Introduction 
by Lorenzo Carcaterra
Modern Library Classics

Jack London lived many lives. His burning curiosity led him to travel both his country and the world, free of the burden of money and filled with the passion of youth. He glimpsed each city, town, and port from the ground up, propelled by the vast richness of the land and the immense poverty of the people, each voyage leaving him hanging by threads from the irresistible pull of danger.
     He was an oyster pirate who respected the power and majesty of the murky waters of the San Francisco Bay, where he plied his trade. He was a rail bum with a deep and unfettered love of nature and all that she offered. He had a fighter's will and a poet's heart, was as good with his fists in the dark alleys off a corner saloon as he was with a pen hunkered over a small desk in a dim room, in those quiet hours before the arrival of dawn. He attacked all he did with a full tank of passion, consumed by the gift of life and the power of the words his fertile mind allowed him to bring to every story he told, every novel he wrote.
     Jack London was the first great American writer of the twentieth century.
     It is a title he deserves and one he fought a brutal battle to earn. Long before the arrival of fame, London would scramble from publisher to publisher, in an attempt to earn a living by selling magazine and newspaper articles, short stories, and books. Each tale had been pulled from the rich underground mine of his memory, late-night yarns told to him by thieves, raiders, pirates, rail bums, prostitutes, and drug addicts. His was a fresh voice, the stories filled with adventure, risk, and daring, the characters as real as an ice storm on a high sea, and it didn't take long for London to be noticed and a bright and promising voice to be heard.
     He wrote about people he knew, the animals that had helped him brave severe winters and horrible storms, and the places he had seen and loved. The combination of the short stories (To Build a Fire), novels (The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf), and newspaper accounts (his retelling of a Jack Johnson heavyweight title bout is one of the most realistic renderings of a boxing match ever put to paper) proved to be both lucrative and lethal. It helped bring to literary light a new and fresh form of storytelling, and an eager American public embraced both the tales and the man.
     But Jack London was much more than a man of action who wrote tales of men lot at sea or fighting to survive in the midst of a brutal snowstorm. He was also a student of nature and science and had a strong and intense belief in the healing powers of the mind. He often looked to feed those interests through his selection of the stories he chose to write. And it was those interests that first led him to turn both his pen and his attention to the life of Ed Morrell, a turn-of-the-century California criminal and the basis for the character of Darrell Standing in The Star Rover. Morrell, like many other young men living in California during those heady years, was embroiled in a land dispute with the Southern Pacific Railroad. He felt he had been cheated out of his land by a corrupt and ruthless corporation whose rules often changed on the whim of a faceless board of directors. Whether the charges leveled against the railroad were indeed true is a matter still unresolved, but to a young man like Ed Morrell they were as real as a set of empty pockets and a stomach that would go for days without food. Morrell felt he was left no recourse but to starve or turn to a life of crime. He began small, instigating a series of wanton acts against the railroad and its interests. Then he graduated to a bigger playing field and took part in several high-profile stickups, riding out as the youngest member of the train-robbing Evans and Sontag gang. His efforts landed Morrell's face on a wanted poster, and it wasn't long before a statewide manhunt was called to bring him in or bring him down. He was captured and sentenced to a long stretch behind the harshest bars that the state of California could offer a man -- Folsom Prison and, after an escape attempt went wrong, San Quentin.
     In his youth, London himself had been sent off to prison, granted, under less severe conditions and for much more minor offenses, serving brief sentences for both lobster poaching and vagrancy. It was while incarcerated, under the command of a series of sadistic guards and brutal prison regimes, that Morrell learned to will away the pain and torture of the severe beatings and the nearly five years he spent in solitary confinement through self-hypnosis and astral projection. In no time at all, Ed Morrell became a man Jack London needed to meet.
     They first sat across from each other in 1912, and they sealed the friendship that had begun through a series of letters. London had petitioned the prison to have Morrell released -- both from the dungeon that had been his home and the prison bars that held him captive. Morrell thanked the author by spending the bulk of that first meeting describing the months he had spent in the down-in-the-dark nowhere of San Quentin and the different forms of torture that had been inflicted by the guards. The friendship blossomed, and when not on a lecture tour (the early-twentieth-century version of the talk show circuit) Morrell spent his days as a guest at London's Beauty Ranch in Oakland. The stories Morrell told London fed into the writer's interest in both the study of criminology and the harsh methods of the penal system (an interest initially fueled by the writings of Professor W.H. Chaney, a man long-rumored to be Jack London's biological father). Throughout those long weeks, London spent his time doing what many of the great novelists do. He sat back, sipped his coffee, listened, absorbed, and made Morrell's story his own. Within days of Morrell's departure, Jack London began writing his eighth and final novel.
     The Star Rover is one of London's most passionate books. The writing is tense and sparse, filled with a below-the-radar rage at the inhumanity of the inmate's long nights of suffering and a romantic's eye toward a life that could have been lived in a better place, under far more serene conditions. The novel is an intriguing mix of London's writing at its best. With the eye of an artist, he sketches the warm bond of friendship shared by the prisoners, who are as relaxed swapping stories in their cells as he once had been in front of many campfires, surrounded by hard men with hard tales to tell. These passages are quickly followed by a deep and brutal plunge into their sinister reality, as those very same prisoners are beaten and strapped into their straitjackets and left to ponder the misery of their existence. The Star Rover is a work of pure power. It is written with energy and force, brilliantly marching between the nether worlds of brutality and beauty, horror and happiness, nightmares and daydreams.
     When it was first published in 1915, the critics, growing weary of London's page-turning and emotional sagas, were quickly put off and attacked the novel with a viciousness never directed at any of his prior works. This backlash discouraged readers from flocking to it as readily as they had to White Fang, Martin Eden, or The Sea-Wolf. But London was neither deterred nor disappointed. He had, as he always set out to do, told exactly the story he wanted to tell, in his own manner and under the weight and glory of his own words. To him and now to us, nearly ninety years later, The Star Rover is proof that a great work will always withstand the harshest tests that time can throw its way, outlast any critical assault, and survive the battle. According to Irving Stone's brilliant biography of London, Sailor on Horseback, the author wrote a letter to one of the few critics who had praised The Star Rover. "If my stories are fierce," he wrote, "then life is fierce. I think life is strong not fierce, and I try to make my stories as strong as life is strong."
     A few months before he died on November 22, 1916, a victim of either uremic of morphine poisoning, London answered a letter sent to him by a young woman growing weary of the struggles of a writer's life. "The game is worth the candle," London wrote. "Yes, indeed, the game is worth the candle."
     We have never had and may never have again a writer as strong as Jack London.
     And his is a candle that will burn till the end of days.

Copyright (C) 2003 by Lorenzo Carcaterra. Posted by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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