The proper function of a man is to live not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. Jack London

Jack London was an American author, journalist and social activist. He was born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco.

The memory of Jack London's early life was etched and scarred by the bitterness of poverty. His family was continually on the move to find subsistence. At the age of ten the boy was on the street selling newspapers to supplement the family's meager income. The memory of Jack London's early life was etched and scarred by the bitterness of poverty. His family was continually on the move to find subsistence. At the age of ten the boy was on the street selling newspapers to supplement the family's meager income.

In 1897 and 1898, London, like many other American and Canadian men, went north to Alaska and the Klondike region of Canada to search for gold. This was the Alaska Gold Rush. Although London never found any gold, his experience in the extreme environment of this cold part of the world gave him ideas for the stories he would write when he decided to return to California.

Upon his return to the San Francisco area, he began to write about his experiences. After winning a writing contest, he succeeded in selling some of his stories and in 1900, he published a collection of his short stories, The Son of the Wolf.

London wrote more than 50 books and enjoyed enormous international popularity as an author. His exciting, often violent and brutal writing style attracted readers from all over the world and his stories and novels were translated into many different languages.

By the age of 29 he was already internationally famous for The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea- Wolf (1904), and other literary and journalistic accomplishments.

Love of Life is a short story that tells about a man who was abandoned by his partner and found himself alone, side by side with the wolf. Starving and injured, he struggles physically and spiritually to come to grips with what is true value of his life.

The Call of the Wild is one of Jack London's most popular novels. The story follows a dog named Buck. The dog is abducted from a comfortable life as a pet and tossed into the chaos of the Klondike Gold Rush and the brutal realities of frontier life. Buck changes hands a number of times before landing in the kindly hands of John Thornton.

Jack London's tales are more than epics of hardship and survival -- they are morality plays in which good wins over evil. In WHITE FANG, virtue takes shape in a young prospector and his fiercely loyal wolf-dog. It's a timeless tale of courage and survival as well as a touching friendship between man and animal.

Martin Eden is a (1909) novel by American author Jack London about a young sailor struggling to become a writer. Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse. Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background and the Morses are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of wealth and refinement. It is a semi-autobiographical novel. Moreover, the character of Ruth Morse was modelled on Mabel Applegarth the first love of London's life.

London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. London's ashes were buried, together with those of his second wife Charmian, in Jack London State Historic Park, California,