novels

This extraordinary tale of high seas and high emotions starts off calmly enough when the thirty-something, well-read and rather wealthy narrator embarks on a modern steam-driven ferry-boat in the Bay of San Francisco and muses on the efficient division of labour in modern society, whereby well-trained men can efficiently operate such magnificent and complex machines for the benefit of people like him in all security. But then a fog comes up, things do not at all follow the modern-comforts (…)

The first paragraph of this tale of a wolf-dog coming to terms with civilization will make you want to read on : Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that (…)

The Iron Heel is Jack London’s militant declaration of faith in the final victory of socialism – of the purist variety – over the iniquitous system of capitalism that was an absolute scandal and anathema to him.
The term “socialist” in 21st-century English is a quite inadequate term to convey the nature of deeply-felt radical thought at the beginning of the 20th century, when extreme violence was commonplace in labour disputes, when Marx and Engels and Herbert Spencer exercised enormous (…)

This is about a rough, uneducated, young 20-year-old sailor and ex-gang-leader with a lot of drive and years of sailing all over the high seas behind him getting introduced to high society after having rescued the son of a wealthy family from a street brawl.
He rapidly develops strong ideas about love (of the wonderfully captivating daughter of the house), society (the shallowness of the world-outlook of the finally quite despicable bourgeois class), education (which he decides to catch up (…)

This big and quite ambitious rags-to-riches-and-back story has a long first part describing the adventures of the central personage Elam Harnish – known by one and all as Burning Daylight because of his habit of routing his comrades out of their blankets with the complaint that daylight was burning – on his way to acquiring a formidable fortune in the Klondike gold rush in northern Canada in the late 1890’s, and then how he continues his economic adventures in the even tougher world of (…)

John Pathurst is a rich, very successful and very blasé 30-year-old writer who has taken passage on a big four-masted sailing-ship carrying coals from Baltimore to Seattle, with the aim of resting his jaded nerves. Right away there are signs that the trip is not going to be an easy one – the crew is a gang of drunken, incompetent landlubbers, his quarters are not the best on the ship much to his annoyance, the captain and first mate are strange fellows indeed and, especially, there is a (…)

A university professor, who has been condemned to life imprisonment in the (in)famous San Quentin prison in California for the murder of another professor in an uncontrolled fit of rage, is constantly subjected to the excruciatingly painful straight-jacket treatment, consisting of leaving him lying on the floor tied up as tightly as possible for hours and even days at a time, to make him confess where the dynamite that a group of convicts is supposed to have smuggled into the prison is (…)

Told essentially from the point of view of Saxon, a beautiful young laundry-sweatshop working-girl who meets at the very beginning of this working-class romance the man of her dreams Billy, a handsome young teamster and former prize-fighter. Billy sweeps her off her feet and they get married a couple of weeks after their first encounter.
We follow the couple as they struggle to make ends meet in San Francisco in the difficult economic state of the times, as Saxon has to stop working as (…)

As Jack London recounts in the interesting foreword to this unusual book, not only was he incapable of writing a successful film script, but “because a man had written a score of novels was no guarantee that he could write a good scenario. Quite to the contrary, it was quickly discovered that the surest guarantee of failure was a previous record of success in novel-writing.” And on the other hand, successful scriptwriters such as Charles Goddard, the co-author of this action novel with (…)

Dick Forrest is the very wealthy, very handsome and very charming owner of an immense 250,000-acre ranch in the rich farmland of the Sacramento River valley where he breeds livestock that he exports all over the United States and elsewhere. Former hobo in his youth, former captain of the U. of C. Varsity football team, holder of a graduate degree in agronomics, he has also had years of wild adventures in the Klondike and the South Seas. He excels at everything he does – athletics, (…)