On 12 January 1876, in a rough San Francisco neighbourhood, a baby boy named John Griffith London was born. Friends called him Jack. His family was poor - really poor. By age ten he was selling newspapers on street corners. By thirteen he was working ten-hour days in a smelly factory canning pickles. By fifteen he had bought a tiny boat with borrowed money and was sailing around the bay raiding oyster beds at night. He read every book he could get his hands on, scribbling notes by candlelight.
Then, at 21, gold was discovered in the Klondike, way up in Canada's frozen Yukon. Jack joined the rush. He hiked through deep snow with an 1,800-pound load of supplies on his back, crossed icy rivers, and lived through a brutal sub-zero winter in a tiny cabin. He never found gold. But he listened to other miners' wild stories around campfires, watched the sled dogs work, and stored it all up in his head. When he came home thin and broke, he sat at his desk and wrote 1,000 words a day, every single day.
In 1903, his novel The Call of the Wild was published - the tale of a pet dog named Buck stolen and forced to pull sleds through the Yukon. It was a smash hit. White Fang followed. By 35, Jack London was one of the highest-paid writers in the world. His adventure books have stayed in print for more than a hundred years, and kids today still curl up with Buck and the sled team, racing through pages of snow and stars.
