The Sea-Wolf

Humphrey Van Weyden, a gentle literary critic from San Francisco, is thrown into the sea when his ferry sinks and is picked up by a sealing schooner bound for Japan. Its captain, Wolf Larsen, is a brute of extraordinary strength and intelligence who reads philosophy and believes that life is meaningless and only the strong survive, and he makes Humphrey a cabin boy.

Published in 1904, The Sea-Wolf is a sea adventure and a battle of ideas between a softened intellectual and a ruthless individualist, later joined by the poet Maud Brewster. Jack London meant it as a critique of the Nietzschean superman. For London's own semi-autobiographical struggle, read Martin Eden.

Jack London (1876–1916) grew up poor in San Francisco and Oakland and lived a life as wild as his books: an oyster pirate at fifteen, a sailor on a sealing ship to Japan, a tramp, a socialist agitator and a gold seeker in the Klondike in 1897, where he caught scurvy and gathered material for a lifetime.

The Call of the Wild made him famous in 1903, and he became one of the best-paid writers of his day, producing White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden among more than fifty books. He died on his California ranch at forty.