Biographies and Literary Criticism of Jack London

To date no conclusive or definitive biography exists on Jack London. It is quite difficult to separate fact from all the myths and hyperbole surrounding him, which London himself was guilty of creating in his efforts to market his work to editors. Over the years—too many biographers failed to do sufficient research—instead they relied upon the use of information such as from Irving Stone's biography Sailor on Horseback which contained many errors and undocumented information from interviews with persons who knew London. He also used a good amount of his own life's experiences in his stories, and some have mistakenly sketched their London biographies from such sources.

Biographies and Literary Criticism

Auerbach, Johnathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Bamford, George Loring. The Mystery of Jack London. Oakland, CA: The Piedmont Press, 1931.

Barltrop, Robert. Jack London, the Man, the Writer, the Rebel. London: Pluto Press, 1976.

Calder-Marshall, Arthur. Lone Wolf: The Story of Jack London. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1962.

Day, Grove. Jack London in the South Seas. New York: Four Winds Press, 1971.

Foner, Philip. Rebel Jack London: American Rebel. (Citadel Press, 1947).

Franchere, Ruth. Jack London: The Pursuit of a Dream. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1962.

Garst, Doris Shannon. Jack London, Magnet for Adventure. New York: J. Messner, 1944.

Johnson, Martin. Through the South Seas with Jack London. Cedar Springs, MI: Wolf House Books, 1972.

Geismar, Maxwell. "Jack London:The Short Cut." In his Rebels and Ancestors in the American Novel, 1890-1915. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953, pp. 139-216.

Hedrick, Joan. Solitary Comrade. (University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

Kershaw, Alex. Jack London: A Life. (St. Martin's Press, 1997).

Kingman, Russ. A Pictorial Life of Jack London. New York: Crown, 1979. A sympathetic but well-researched, reliable biography.

Johnston, Carolyn. Jack London--An American Radical? (Greenwood, 1966).

Labor, Earle. Jack London. Twayne's United States Authors series, 230. New York: Twayne, 1974

Labor, Earl and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Jack London. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1st ed. 1974, 1994 (new edition).

Lane, Fredrick A. The Greatest Adventure; A Story of Jack London. American Heritage Series. New York: Aladdin Books, 1954.

Lane, Rose Wilder. He Was a Man. New York: harper, 1925.

London, Charmian Kittredge. The Book of Jack London, 2 volumes (Century, 1921).

London, Charmian Kittredge. The Log of the Snark. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1915.

London, Charmian Kittredge. Our Hawaii. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917.

London, Joan. Jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

London, Joan. Jack London and His Daughters (Heyday, 1990).

McClintock, James I. White Logic: Jack London's Short Stories. Wolf House Books Monograph Two. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wolf House Books, 1975.

Nuernberg, Susan M., "Jack London, Revised Edition." (book reviews) Studies in Short Fiction, Spring 1995 v32 n2 p278(2)

Nuernberg, Susan M., ed. The Critical Response to Jack London. Westwood, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

O'Connor, Richard. Jack London: A Biography (Little, Brown, 1964).

Sherman, Joan R. Jack London: A Reference Guide. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977).

Recknagel, Rolf. Jack London Berlin: Verlag Neus Leben, 1975.

Sinclair, Andrew. Jack: A Biography of Jack London (Harper & Row, 1977).

Starr, Kevin. The Sonoma Finale of Jack London, Rancher in Americans and the California Dream (Oxford, 1973).

Stasz, Clarice. American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London (St. Martin's, 1988).

Stasz, Clarice. Jack London's Women University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Stone, Irving. Sailor on Horseback: The Biography of Jack London. (Houghton Mifflin, 1938).
—. Irving Stone's jack London. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1977.

Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline, ed. Critical Essays on Jack London. Boston, MA: G.K.Hall, 1983.

Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. "Social Myth as Parody in Jack London's Northern Tales." Thalia 9, ii [1987]: 3-14. (Parodies myths by putting them in Klondike setting; feminist criticism.)

Walcutt, Charles Child. Jack London. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, 57. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1966.

Walker, Dale L., and James E. Sisson III. The Fiction of Jack London: A Chronological Bibliography. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1972.

Walker, Franklin. Jack London and the Klondike (Huntington, 1966).