On January 12, 1876, in a bankrupt farmer's home in San Francisco, USA, a little boy was born.
At the age of 8, the boy became a shepherd boy on a livestock farm, and at the age of 10 began selling newspapers in Auckland or working as a small worker on the docks or as a water worker on a sailboat or a factory to make ends meet.
At the age of 16, he wandered throughout the eastern United States and Canada, and at the age of 17 became a sailor on a seal hunting vessel, passing through North Korea and Japan to hunt in the Bering Sea.
During this time, he went to Alaska to pan for gold, but unfortunately found nothing.
A few years later, he began experimenting with writing and went to work for the tramway company in the hope of mastering the most advanced electrical techniques of the time, during which time his first collection of novels was published.
At the age of 28, he traveled to the Far East as a journalist to report on the Russo-Japanese War, but was caught as a spy by the Japanese and imprisoned for a while, and after his release, he took a boat to Incheon, North Korea, and rode to Pyongyang, where he was once again imprisoned by the Japanese. Eventually, with the intervention of the United States, he returned to the United States.
After returning to the United States, he began to wander north America by train by fare evasion, during which he was arrested and imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor. After being released from prison, he went to the west coast of Canada, where he sailed south as a sailor and returned to his hometown of San Francisco.
At the age of 30, he decided to build a boat of his own and planned to travel around the world. He sailed to Hawaii and then to Australia, where his self-built ship could not move forward, and he contracted a strange disease, so he sold the ship and ended his journey around the world.
At the age of 41, he was already suffering from uremia and died of an overdose of morphine.
He came from a humble background, only read primary school, but he loved to read, although he worked hard for life when he was young, he read a lot of books, all kinds of books, he read Literary giants such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, read Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and other thinkers, also read Darwin and Spencer, also read Marx, and generally knew the meaning of communism;
He did not have higher education, but he loved to write, and in his short life, he left behind 19 novels, more than 150 short stories, 3 plays and other rich literary works, many of which are still popular with readers.
He's the American writer Jack. London, a free soul, a writer who shattered the "American Dream", a working-class writer who longed for communism in the early days and fell into individualism in the later stages.
Born into a shabby family, his early experiences at the bottom and wandering around allowed him to see the darkness of society and the exploitative nature of capitalism, so his work was full of two things—criticism and freedom.
Critically, many of his works beat the pulse of the challenge to capitalist society, which is related to his early experiences, born and broken, in order to live from the age of 8 to earn a living, to see too much social injustice, personally experienced the exploitation of capitalists, saw the predatory nature of capitalists, worked as a sailor, traveled to most parts of the northern hemisphere, found that the exploitative nature of capitalism exists everywhere, worked as a war correspondent, saw the cruelty of war and the bloodiness of imperialism, his semi-autobiographical novel "Martin. Eden", which vividly describes the exploitation in capitalist society, the estrangement among the various strata, and the greedy face of the capitalist.
Freedom, he longed for freedom, loved life, and through his own efforts, he went from a poor person at the bottom of the primary school education level to a rich literary writer; he expected to be able to travel around the world and put it into action, although only half successful, he did what many people wanted to do but failed to do; he saw a lot of helplessness and hypocrisy of man, and longed for the soul of animals that rushed to freedom. His short story "Love of Life", based on his own real experience of gold panning, wrote his love for life, contrary to the capitalist's love of capital rather than life, the novella "The Call of the Wild" shows his yearning for freedom through the depiction of animals.
He's Jack. London, a free soul, a writer who yearns for freedom but is lost in the whirlpool of self.