o Jack London, home was literally wherever he hung his hat. One researcher has identified thirty-three places he lived as a youth—in San Francisco, Oakland, Livermore, Alameda, and San Mateo County—as he followed the fading fortunes of his stepfather, John London. The young wanderer also found a home on any sea-going craft, skiff to schooner, with sails; in a tramp's boxcar and tent, and around his campfire; in a log cabin outside Dawson City; in a correspondents' camp in frozen Korea or arid Mexico; a jail cell in Buffalo, New York; a workhouse in an East End ghetto in London; a hotel in Tokyo, Hobart, or Panama City; a grass hut in Fiji, a bungalow in Honolulu.

In 1909 he had to abandon the Snark voyage to recuperate in a Sydney, Australia, hospital from the tropical ailments he had contracted. He and Charmian made a roundabout return voyage home on the Scotch collier Tymeric, touching at Pitcairn's Island, Ecuador, and New Orleans, then traveling overland by train to California. He reached Glen Ellen in July, and by the time Martin Eden was published in September, begun concentrating his energy and funds into expanding and building up his property in the Valley of the Moon. Important in this planning was the idea of a great mansion, his first real, permanent, home.

Back in July, 1905, London bought a 130-acre ranch in Sonoma County, fifty miles north of San Francisco, "the most beautiful, primitive land to be found in California," he said of the one-time Tokay vineyard and winery. He fell in love with the place, its fertile soil, its ancient redwoods, firs, tanbark oaks, maples, madrones and manzanitas, its canyons, silvery streams and springs, and its isolation. The new Mrs. London, Charmian Kittredge, loved it as well. She had been raised in Oakland, attended Mills College, worked as a secretary and reviewed books for The Overland Monthly, the magazine founded by Bret Harte which in 1899 gave London his first national exposure as a writer. Charmian, a breezy, pretty, athletic horsewoman who disdained the sidesaddle and rode like a man, shared her husband's adventures in the South Seas and wherever he roamed, shared his agrarian dream and the planning of what the two called their "Beauty Ranch."

By buying six adjacent properties over the next eight years the Londons increased their land holdings to 1,400 acres and operated an innovative farming and livestock operation. London often consulted his neighboring rancher Luther Burbank, the celebrated horticulturist, studied and learned soil conservation to renew worked-out lands, employing terracing techniques he had observed in his travels as war correspondent in Manchuria, Japan, and Korea in 1904. He raised Shire horses, chickens, fruits, vegetables and grains; built the first concrete silo in the state and a "pig palace" to feed, water and raise his Jersey Duroc hogs, sows and broods; brought in huge hay crops said to be the finest in northern California; and planted eucalyptus trees as a future lumber source.

The year 1911, a signal year for his ranch, also became the most productive of London's literary career: Twenty-four of his stories appeared in the best-read and highest-paying periodicals in the country and, under the Macmillan imprint appeared one novel, one nonfiction book, and two story collections, much of the work the beginning harvest of his South Seas voyage. He was earning seventy thousand dollars a year, a rich man's earnings in pre-World War I dollars, and spending one hundred thousand dollars, pouring his royalties and book contract advances into his land and the great stone and redwood house that would be his home and headquarters.

In fact, he was publishing too much, writing furiously to keep ahead of his bills, and, worse, borrowing on work to come. In May, 1911, he wrote to George Brett, the Macmillan president: "Having now a beautiful dream-ranch, I am doing on this dream-ranch two things: I am planting eucalyptus trees by the hundreds of thousands, and I am also building my dream-house." He proceeded to ask Brett for a thousand-dollar advance each month for five months to complete a new novel, The Valley of the Moon. Brett, nearly always amenable to his star author's appeals, advanced some money but warned Jack to slow down, that he was clogging the market with his work.

This was not welcome news and in 1912, after twenty-six books in ten years with Macmillan, London switched publishers. Doubleday, Page, brought out a collection of his South Sea stories, A Son of the Sun, and in 1912-1913, The Century Company published four London books. Only one of these, John Barleycorn, was remarkable. He called it, somewhat extravagantly, a "bare, bald, absolute fact, a recital of my own experiences in the realm of alcohol."

In July, 1912, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported that "Jack London is building a charming home on his country estate at Glen Ellen," and said, "When London is not grinding out fiction for the Saturday Evening Post, or some other periodical, at the rate of ten cents a word, he is directing the pouring of concrete or the placing of beams and rafters in his new residence."

That December he wrote Frank H. Scott, president of the Century Company, for an advance of three thousand dollars against the nearly-completed John Barleycorn: "In order that you don't think me a wastrel," Jack wrote, "I enclose herewith a very inaccurate article upon the home I am building." He said the tile roof alone cost $2,500, and that he had stonemasons, plumbers and carpenters to pay.

London had, in fact, fifty-three employed workers on the ranch, including a thirty-five-man construction crew building Wolf House, and was supporting an extended family: mother Flora, a nephew, his stepsister Eliza Shepard and her son, his ex-wife Bess Maddern London, his daughters from that marriage, Joan and Bess, and "Aunt Jennie" Prentiss, a black woman who had been his wet nurse as a child and to whom Jack was devoted.

Century published The Abysmal Brute, a prize-fight novella and his thirty-fourth book, in May, 1913, and while awaiting publication of John Barleycorn, London negotiated with George Brett to return to Macmillan. Brett agreed to take him back but advised him to slow down production. Jack agreed but wrote a friend, "If I should die at this precise moment I would die owing $100,000."

Meantime, Cosmopolitan paid him one thousand dollars for the serialization of The Valley of the Moon and contracted him for another novel and a dozen stories. He also made some pocket money from a photo and endorsement that ran in the magazine, a testimonial to his status as a national celebrity: "I am tremendously pleased with the antiseptic qualities of your Formamint tablets. Formamint is a real cleanser of mouth germs."

That spring and early summer of 1913 he juggled checks and bills and worker schedules, wrote his voluminous correspondence (experimenting with a new Dictaphone), bought farm equipment, ordered lumber, and worked on a big sea novel, The Mutiny of the Elsinore. One of his greatest triumphs in his role as gentleman farmer was buying an imported Shire stallion for the horse-breeding enterprise on the ranch. The horse cost $2,500.

Except for playing pinochle with guests at the cottage he and Charmian occupied while awaiting construction of their new residence, the ranch and "castle" absorbed what time he could spare from his writing. Eventually, he would even mortgage the cottage to continue construction of Wolf House.