![]() Instead he found complacent professors and little concern about the outside world. He hoped to find a world of intellectual challenge and bright ideas and vitality. London prepared himself extensively to enter the University of California at Berkeley, doing in four months the preparation and reading that took most students two years to complete. There are other speakers in plenty, but London always draws the biggest crowd and the most respectful attention." The JanuSan Francisco Chronicle reported: "Jack London, who is known as the boy socialist in Oakland, is holding forth nightly to the crowds that throng City Hall park. He joined the Socialist Labor Party and was soon giving speeches in Oakland's City Hall Park. The Board of Education called for disciplinary action, but London was moving on to other worlds. In one article, he charged "The powers that be" with creating a program of "long hours, sweating systems and steadily decreasing wages" leading "to naught but social and moral degradation." Chosen as one of the debaters at the graduating exercises, he launched into a blistering oration calling for the destruction of the existing social order and declaring that he was personally prepared to use any means to bring this about. London was able to go back to school, and at Oakland High School began writing articles for the student literary magazine, The Aegis. I had been reborn, but not renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was." But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing it, withal, an unscientific one. He would later write, "I think it is apparent that my rampant individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in. Experiences like this hardened London's class perspective. London soon learned that he had displaced the work of two men and was getting paid less than half of what they made together. The superintendent projected a great future by starting at the bottom and working hard. He talked the superintendent at a power plant into giving him a job as a coal heaver. Returning later in the year, he entered a writing contest sponsored by the San Francisco Morning Call and won the contest with his "Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan."īut he still had to make a living. When he was seventeen he shipped out on the Sophia Sutherland for Japan, beginning a life-long love of the sea. He decided anything was better than this life and became an "oyster pirate," stealing oysters from tidewaters owned by the Southern Pacific Railway. He began to brood over a system that would let six and seven year old children work such long hours and their families live in shacks while the factory owners lived in splendor and their children went to finishing school. He worked twelve to eighteen hour days for ten cents an hour and had little time to read. He read in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening.īut his family's fortunes turned even worse and he was forced to get a job in a cannery. ![]() He found a friend here, Ina Coolbrith-later to become California's first Poet Laureate-who guided his reading. He was a newsboy, street kid picking up pennies sweeping out saloons on Broadway between Sixth and Seventh in Oakland, working on an ice wagon, setting up pins in a bowling alley.īut he also discovered the Oakland Public Library and became a voracious reader. Two things shaped London's youth-the constant struggle to help support his family and the world of books. The family soon moved across the Bay to Oakland, where the young London grew up. With his family extremely poor and his father sickly and unable to make much money, the search for cheaper accommodations was constant. Shortly after Jack was born, his family moved to Bernal Heights, then to a two-story house at 920 Natoma Street, then to a flat on Folsom Street. London, a life-long socialist, would find it ironic that his birthplace is now a bank, but then his own life was full of contradictions. This plaque on the Wells Fargo building at 3rd Street and Brannan in San Francisco is one of the few reminders in San Francisco of one of America's great writers. "To mark the birthplace of the noted author, Jack London, January 12, 1876." ![]()
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