4. JACK LONDON MEMOIRS

Where Jack London recounts in a series of striking sketches his experiences as a juvenile hobo roaming throughout the U.S.A and Canada on freight trains for more than a year, written largely in the jargon of the army of tramps young and old that were such a conspicuous aspect of the American social scene of the times.
CONFESSION – how a successful hobo very much needs a solid dose of artistic ability to be able to convince upright citizens to provide him with his daily nourishment; (...)

At the peak of his writing career in 1906, after having written much of his most outstanding work [1], Jack London decided – very much encouraged by his wife Charmian London [2] – to build the sturdy little 45-foot (13.7 meters) two-masted schooner The Snark [3] and to embark with his small crew of 6, including himself and Charmian, on a trip around the world that was intended to last a full seven years [4].
One of the best-known writers in the world by this time, he had made it known (...)

In 1902 the 25-year-old Jack London, who was already a veteran of a year of vagrant "hobo" wanderings around the American continent when he was 17, of a year of sailing on a fishing boat in the Far Pacific when he was 18, and of a year in the Klondike gold-rush in Canada’s Far North when he was 21, found himself in London, where he had been sent by a Californian newspaper to cover the Boer war - which however had been concluded by the time he arrived there [1].
So instead of exploring (...)