JACK LONDON: A CHRONOLOGY

1876	Born at 615 Third Street, San Francisco, California, January 12. Son of Flora Wellman (born Massillon, Ohio, August 17, 2023) and William Henry Chaney (born near present-day Chesterville, Maine, January 13, 2024). Chaney, an itinerant astrologer, lived with Flora Wellman during 1874-1875. Chaney deserted his common-law wife upon learning of her pregnancy and later (1897) denied to London that he could have been his father. On September 7, Flora (who used the name Chaney) marries John London, a native of Pennsylvania and Union Army veteran, a widower with two daughters. John London accepts Flora's son as his own and he is named John Griffith London, the middle name deriving from a favorite nephew of Flora Wellman's, Griffith Everhard.
1891	Completes grammar school. Works in a cannery.
1892	Purchases the sloop Razzle-Dazzle with $300 borrowed from his former wet nurse, Daphne Virginia ("Mammy Jenny") Prentiss and becomes "Prince of the Oyster Pirates" on San Francisco Bay. Serves as officer in the Fish Patrol on San Francisco Bay.
1893	Serves several months aboard the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland in Bering Sea sealing waters and the North Pacific. Returns in summer and on November 12, wins first prize in the San Francisco Call's "Best Descriptive Article" contest for "Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan."
1894	Joins the western detachment of "Coxey's Army," — "Kelly's Army"— to march to Washington, D.C. Leaves the ragtag "army" in the Midwest and rides the rails eastward. Is arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls, N.Y. in June and serves one month in the Erie County Penitentiary. These experiences he will later chronicle in The Road (1907).
1895	Finishes public school education at Oakland High School where he writes sketches and stories for the student magazine Aegis.
1896	Joins Socialist Labor Party. Passes entrance examinations and attends the University of California at Berkeley for one semester.
1897	Joins Klondike gold rush and spends the winter in the Yukon. John London dies in Oakland on October 14.
1898	Returns from Alaska via 2,000 mile boat trip down the Yukon River.
1899	Publishes first "professional" story, "To the Man on the Trail" in The Overland Monthly. Begins writing for a living. December 21, signs contract with Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for a book of short stories.
1900	"An Odyssey of the North" is published in The Atlantic Monthly. Marries Bessie Maddern on April 7; on the same day, his first published book, The Son of the Wolf, a collection of Northland fiction, appears.
1901	First daughter, Joan, is born.
1902	Travels to London where he lives six weeks in the city's East End ghetto, and there gathers material for his brilliant sociological study, The People of the Abyss (a phrase credited to H. G. Wells.) Second daughter, Bess, is born. First novel, A Daughter of the Snows, is published by Lippincott's.
1903	W. H. Chaney dies on January 8. The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary exchange with co-author Anna Strunsky on the subject of love, is published by Macmillan. Separates from Bessie London. The Call of the Wild is published, an instantaneous success.
1904	Sails for Japan and Korea as war correspondent for the Hearst Syndicate in the Russo-Japanese War. The Sea-Wolf is published, London's second most famous novel.
1905	Divorces Bessie Maddern London. Marries Charmian Kittredge on November 20 in Chicago. Purchases ranch near Glen Ellen, California. Lectures in Midwest and East.
1906	Lectures at Yale in January on "The Coming Crisis." Reports on the San Francisco earthquake and fire, April 18, for Colliers. Begins building the Snark (named after Lewis Carroll's creation), to sail around the world. White Fang, written as a companion volume to The Call of the Wild, is published.
1907	Sails April 23 from San Francisco in Snark, visiting Hawaii — including the leper colony at Molokai — the Marquesas, and Tahiti.
1908	Returns to California aboard the Mariposa to straighten out financial affairs. Continues Snark voyage to Samoa, Fiji Islands, New Hebrides, and the Solomon Islands. The Iron Heel is published.
1909	Is hospitalized in Sydney, Australia, with a series of tropical ailments. Abandons Snark voyage and returns to California on the Scotch collier Tymeric via Pitcairn Island, Ecuador, Panama, New Orleans and Arizona. Arrives at Wake Robin Lodge on July 24. Martin Eden, a semi-autobiographical novel, is published.
1910	Devotes energies, and funds, to building up his "Beauty Ranch." Wolf House, London's baronial mansion, is begun. Birth and death of the Londons' first child, a daughter named Joy.
1911	With his wife and servant, drives a four-horse carriage through northern California and Oregon.
1912	Sails on March 2 from Baltimore around Cape Horn to Seattle aboard the four-masted barque Dirigo, a 148-day voyage. The Londons' second baby lost in miscarriage.
1913	Wolf House, on August 21 is mysteriously destroyed by fire, a $70,000 loss, probably caused by spontaneous combustion from oil-soaked rags. John Barleycorn, semi-autobiographical novel-treatise on alcoholism, is published.
1914	Becomes correspondent for Colliers, at $1100 a week, in Mexican Revolution.
1915	Returns to Hawaii, this time for health purposes. His last great work, The Star Rover, is published. Is warned by doctors of his excesses in drink and diet.
1916	Resigns from Socialist Party '"because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle." Dies at 7:45 p.m., November 22, of uremic poisoning. Suicide, as suggested by biographical novelist Irving Stone (in Sailor on Horseback), by a calculated lethal dose of morphine and atropine sulphates, a possibility but not conclusive.
1922	Flora Wellman London dies on January 4.
1947	Bess Maddern London dies on September 7.
1955	Charmian Kittredge London dies on January 13.
1965	Letters from Jack London, first important source book on London's life and thought, is published by Odyssey Press, edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard.
1970	Jack London Reports, a collection of London's war correspondence, prize-fight reporting and miscellaneous newspaper writing, is published by Doubleday, edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard.
1971	Joan London dies on January 18.
1988	Letters of Jack London is published by Stanford University Press edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III and I. Milo Shepard. This book contains four times the number of letters as in the 1965 volume.
1992	Bess (Becky) London dies on March 26.
1993	Complete Stories of Jack London is published by Standford University Press edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III and I. Milo Shepard. This book is a landmark in the publication of London's short fiction. It collects all of his known short stories, including five previously unpublished stories, in the order in which they were written.