No abstract

No abstract

"The greatest story Jack London ever wrote," Alfred Kazin once observed, "was the story he lived."1 London was one of those writers whose lives fascinate readers as much as, or perhaps more than, their art. Indeed, his career consists of the stuff of old Hollywood biodramas, a sort of Horatio Alger saga of the poor boy's rise to world fame and great fortune—but with the tragic twist that makes his life a cathartic lesson in the price exacted for pursuing the Bitch Goddess SUCCESS, as William James called our national obsession. London was the prototypic success-as-failure. Even more than with most writers, the now old New Criticism that eschews biography as a legitimate source of literary interpretation proves inadequate for evaluating London, whose life and work seem unusually inextricable. A psychological approach to his art thus appears unavoidable.

No abstract

No abstract