John Griffith “Jack” London (1876 – 1916)
Jack London was born in San Francisco to Flora Wellman. He completed grade school on Oakland and attended the University of California, Berkeley. Rejected by a man he believed was his father, and in financial difficulty, London quit school and travelled to the Yukon in 1897. London stayed for a year, and was an unsuccessful miner on Henderson Creek before a bout of scurvy forced him to leave the creek.1)
The Jack London Museum in Dawson has half of the Yukon home that London lived in on the North Fork of Henderson Creek, a tributary of the Stewart River. The other half of the cabin is in Jack London Square in Oakland, California.2)
London became a novelist, journalist, and a social activist. He was a pioneer in commercial magazine fiction and among the first writers to become an international celebrity. Some of his best-known works were set in the north: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” and “Love of Life.” He also wrote about the South Pacific and the San Francisco Bay area. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction works on the rights of workers.3)