John Barleycorn

Jack London calls this his 'alcoholic memoirs'. He tells how John Barleycorn, the personification of alcohol, first got hold of him when he was five and drank beer he was carrying to his father, and how drink became part of his life as an oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay, a sailor, a tramp and finally a famous writer. He describes the 'White Logic', the cold, despairing truth that alcohol shows him, and argues for prohibition so that young men will not be tempted.

London published the book in 1913, three years before his death at forty, and it was used by the campaigners who brought Prohibition to the United States in 1920. Read London's Martin Eden and The Call of the Wild.

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.