This year marks the 145th anniversary of Jack London's birth. Jack London is an American writer beloved by our readers, and his work has influenced generations of readers.
In this way, Sun Shaoping was led by Tian Xiaoxia to another world. He greedily read everything she brought with him... During this time, he also read "Country Profiles" brought by Xiaoxia and a short collection of Stories by Jack London and the long story "Martin Eden". According to Xiaoxia, Lenin loved Jack London's short story "Love of Life", and the great mentor asked his wife Krupskaya to read it to him a few days before his death. Shaoping read the novel several times, and at night he dreamed of him and an old wolf who wanted to eat him and fight together. ”
Jack London (1876–1916)
This is a description of the twenty-fifth chapter of the first part of Lu Yao's novel "Ordinary World". Lu Yao loved Jack London, and he asked Sun Shaoping to read Jack London's books during the turbulent and chaotic years of the dry summer of 1975, which inspired Sun Shaoping to fight against adversity. Lu Yao's description is credible, because Lenin affirmed some of Jack London's works, and because Jack London's novels attacked all aspects of capitalist society, so that even during the Cultural Revolution, Jack London was still circled as a "progressive writer", and his works were still circulated in society. The writer, who has endured twenty years of hardships in life from Wei Xi, has said: "I thank Jack London, for the difficult days in the labor camp, and I tried everything I could to find his entire work. ”
After the reform and opening up, Jack London's novels have been repeatedly translated and published, with nearly 40 Chinese translations of "The Call of the Wild", nearly 20 Chinese translations of "Martin Eden", and "Love of Life" being selected for the middle school Chinese textbook. The critique of capitalism is one of the reasons Jack London has gained widespread acceptance in China, but it is by no means the whole story. More fundamentally, his praise of vitality, his praise of the spirit of resistance in adversity, and the strong storytelling and readability of his novels have enabled him to be loved by Chinese readers in all periods.
Jack London wrote 19 novels and more than 150 short stories during his lifetime. Among the works he has left behind for posterity, martin eden, the semi-autobiographical novel that is considered by general researchers to be the most ideological and artistic. Martin Eden was created in 1908 and published the following year, when Jack London had already made a name for himself, and his "Call of the Wild" (1903), "Sea Wolf" (1904), "Love of Life" (1907) and others had been published earlier and with great success, and "Martin Eden" pushed him to the brilliant peak of his literary career. The main reason for the novel's popularity is that the first half of it tells the story of how a poor boy became a great writer through personal struggle, which is almost a reproduction of Jack London's own experience in the first half of his life, and the story of the protagonist's struggle to become famous represents the dream of many readers. In fact, Martin Eden originally used "Success" as the title of the book, and later the title of the protagonist of the novel. Martin Eden came from a poor background, and with amazing perseverance, he studied hard and wrote hard, and many of the materials came directly from the author's life experience.
Poster for the 2019 Martin Eden film adaptation
In 2017, I visited the University of California, Berkeley, which was also a school attended by Jack London, and when I walked into the library, I always thought that Jack London might have been sitting here more than a hundred years ago. It was the fall of 1896, and Jack London rode his bike every day from his home in Oakland to the campus in Berkeley. In February 1897, due to financial difficulties, Jack London dropped out of school to become a laundry worker. But a semester of campus life strengthened his belief in taking the path of literature. It was not until 6 years later that the novel "The Call of the Wild" was published, which shook the literary world.
The Call of the Wild is the northern story of the Yukon River Basin created by Jack London on a gold rush to Klondike but did not find a grain of gold sand and returned to San Francisco empty.1 If poverty drove Jack London into the door of literature, his adventures at Klondike introduced him to a new world. Jack London did not dig up an ounce of gold in Klondike, but brought back a literary gold mine, rich in material about the story of the Northern Frontier, enough for him to mine for a lifetime. In 1903, marked by the publication of The Call of the Wild, the 27-year-old Jack London became one of the world's leading writers, and his brilliant literary career began.
From the age of 13 in the Oakland Public Library eagerly reading a book that Miss Curris found for him, to the 26-year-old to write The Call of the Wild, 13 years of time, through his own efforts, self-taught, Jack London's legendary experience has fascinated countless readers, which is the main reason for the great success of his autobiographical novel "Martin Eden". For the author, the first half of the novel has a special appeal, precisely because it advocates a positive life and the spirit of struggle to realize the value of one's life and overcome all difficulties and hardships.
The second half of Martin Eden is written about the personal tragedy of the protagonist of the novel who experiences disillusionment. The common claim that Jack London prophetically wrote the story of the second half of his life into the novel is not realistic. Soon after Martin Eden became famous in the novel, he was struck by disillusionment, saw through the red dust, and committed suicide by throwing himself into the sea. Jack London became famous at the age of 27 with "The Call of the Wild", and when he died of illness at the age of 40, he wrote 50 works such as "Sea Wolf", "White Teeth", "Iron Hoof", "Martin Eden", etc., and his brilliant literary career lasted for 13 years. Jack London put Martin Eden on the path to suicide because his novels never had a happy ending. Jack London himself came from a poor family, began to work as a child at a young age, wandered around, had a deep understanding of the miserable situation at the bottom of society, and had a deep understanding of the nature of society. The short story "Greater Misfortune", which he composed when he was in high school at the age of 19, tells the story of a young musician who commits suicide because he has lost his childhood dreams and is pessimistic and disappointed in society. Therefore, Jack London will not take the happy ending of popular novels as his own literary creation formula, but will create an unprecedented, idealized, legendary literary image that has experienced the pain and happiness of the world, exposing the decay and darkness of the money society. In 1909, Jack London gave his long-cherished wish to Martin Eden. Martin Eden is not an autobiography, but a semi-autobiographical novel, and the second half of the novel's "disillusionment" storyline is fictional by the author. Jack London may have had a post-success pessimism when he wrote this novel, "but epistemic pessimism was not a guide to his real life, and he struggled all his life to realize the value of his life."
In the summer of 2018, I visited Jack London's former home in sonoma Valley. Sonoma Valley is also called Moon Valley, which means "multi-month" in Indian legend. Yearning for rural life, Jack London used the royalties of Seawolf to buy the 130-acre Hill Farm at the foot of Sonoma Hill, and then the adjacent 110-acre Lamotte Farm. Jack London lived on this beautiful farm for 11 years and wrote famous articles such as "Love of Life". His half-sister Eliza helped manage the farm, and the two of them often rode horses between the valleys. Two weeks before Jack London's death, the two men rode again to the hill overlooking the Valley of the Moon, and Jack London said to his sister, "When I die, I hope you will bury my ashes on this hill." On November 22, 1916, Jack London died of uremia at the age of 40. His ashes were returned to the farm and buried on a hill overlooking the Valley of the Moon.
The summer in sonoma valley is beautiful, with towering trees, green grass and babbling streams. Especially when the moon rises, the valley is bathed in moonlight, a quiet, a hazy. On the way home, what came to my mind was Jack London's inscription on the title page of Martin Eden:
Let me spend my life in the boiling of blood!
Let me get drunk in a wine-like dream!
Do not let me see this mortal flesh,
Finally destroyed by the mud and dust with an empty shell! (Editor-in-charge: Zhang Yuyao)