Franklin Walker echoed these sentiments, writing me, "... too much has been done to popularize London's life — the illegitimacy, drinking, marriages, suicide, etc. More is needed to present him adequately as a craftsman..."

     And Hensley Woodbridge observed: "It seems to me that too much has been written based on too little knowledge of London's work. Only a thorough knowledge of London's fiction would prepare one to write on any part of it."

     These observations, identical to my own thoughts in nearly twenty years of interest in Jack London, represent the origin of the present work, and the source of what I hope will be its usefulness as a guide for those who wish to know something more than the ordinary about Jack London himself as well as about his work. In the neglected fiction, I believe, there are neglected ideas worth attention.

     Jack London's fictional canon alone is a prodigious one for a man who began writing professionally in 1899 and who died in 1916. Of the fifty-six books that bear his name, forty-two are works of fiction. These include twenty-two novels and twenty short story collections.*

     Add to this output London's published essays, articles, poems, plays, reviews, separately published letters, and newspaper work (a total of something over 700 items which need to be published in a multi-volume work as has the short fiction), and one has a view of this remarkable literary productivity.

     In examining all of the London stories and novels in their original published form, it became clear that many errors had occurred in previous bibliographies — errors in titles of stories, periodical titles, in "classifying" nonfiction work as fiction, in the dates of appearances of certain works, and errors of omission.

* Throughout this work, John Barleycorn and Hearts of Three are considered novels although the former is sometimes viewed as autobiography, the latter as a "movie scenario." In addition, for the purposes of this work, Smoke Bellew is considered a collection of individual stories, and The Kempton-Wace Letters is not included as a work of fiction.

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