The scurvy he contracted in his early travels left him with lasting gum problems. Unfortunately, illness dogged him for most of his life. London identified the four great things in life as work, sincerity, a philosophy of life and good health. In 1909, London published Martin Eden, a novel that is in part an attack on the masquerade of celebrity that helps “enslave” the public.
He would surely have been amused by Oscar-nominated actor Ford’s attack on Donald Trump during a promotional interview with Jimmy Kimmel for The Call of the Wild. In 1908, London published a dystopian novel called The Iron Heel, which chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. Despite all his success and riches, he said he remained a pessimist because of the behaviour of “a mighty ruling class that intends to hold fast to its possessions”. In his final decade, London became increasingly politically engaged. He punched a Japanese officer he caught stealing food from a horse, and was saved from a court-martial only by the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt. His third scrape proved to be his last of the war. A week later, he was arrested again and sent to a military prison near Seoul. He was arrested by Japanese secret police in Chemulpo Bay for taking war photographs of Japanese forces. In 1904, he accepted a commission from Hearst newspapers to report from the Korean Peninsula on the Russo-Japanese War. In 1906, he spent $7,000 ($200,000 or £154,000 in today’s money) on a 55ft cutter-rigged ketch of his own design, naming it The Snark, after Lewis Carroll’s poem.īuying his own boat was part of a relentless quest for adventure. The public didn’t seem to care anyway and the success of The Call of the Wild, along with The Sea-Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1906), made London rich. London laughed off the row, claiming that Young’s book was simply one of several sources for his novel. The magazine printed passages of both books side-by-side as evidence. In 1907, the weekly New York magazine The Independent carried a story headlined, “Is Jack London a plagiarist?” The article suggested that London had ripped off Egerton R Young’s book My Dogs in Northland.
London was caught up in his own controversy following the publication of his bestseller. In the 2020 film, Buck is a CGI creation. In that film, Buck was played by three leonberger dog “actors”. It was a role first played by Clark Gable in the 1935 version of The Call of the Wild, a performance still stained by controversy, because the surviving family of Loretta Young have since claimed that the 34-year-old Gable raped his 22-year-old co-star during the production. Thornton is portrayed in the new film by Harrison Ford. In the novel, Buck becomes the property of outdoorsman John Thornton and the dog ends up saving his master’s life.
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