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Jack London 1876-1916 |
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Page 11
"The Leopard Man's Story" — Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly v. 56 (August 1903), 408-409. [MF]
London received $25 for this story. "The Marriage of Lit-Lit" — Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, v. 56 (September 1903), 461-468. [FM]
London received $75 for this story in July 1903. "Local Color" — Ainslee's, v. 12 (October 1903), 74-82. [MF]
Frederick Feied states that the ideas in this thin tale were "far better expressed in 'The Tramp,' which was published some four months later." (Feied, No Pie in the Sky, The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. New York: The Citadel Press, 1964, p. 33.) London originally titled this story "The Hobo". He received $150 for it. "Too Much Gold" — Ainslee's, v. 12 (December 1903), 109-117. [FM]
London received $100 for this story. "Amateur Night" — The Pilgrim (Battle Creek, Marshall, Detroit, Mich.), v. 7 (December 1903), 5-6, 37. [MF]
London received $75 for this story on November 14, 1903. |
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1904
"Keesh, the Bear Hunter" — Holiday Magazine for Children, v. 1
(January 1904), 163-167. [LL]
This story is often reprinted (as in LL) as "The Story of Keesh." It was reprinted as "The Mystery of Keesh" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in June 1955. London received $27.50 for it.
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The Sea-Wolf — Serialized in The Century Magazine, January-November, 1904.
Book publication: New York, The Macmillan Co., October 1904. George Brett of Macmillan was so excited over The Sea-Wolf that he sent it to the editor of Century, who paid $4,000 for serial rights if given the right to blue-pencil the latter half of the novel in which Humphrey Van Weyden and Maud Brewster are left alone on an island — in 1904 a situation sure to produce palpitations in all lady readers. The novel sold 40,000 copies before its release. When London went to Manchuria to report on the Russo-Japanese War, the proofs of the novel were entrusted to his poet friend George Sterling.
Walcutt has observed that the novel takes on a decidedly different turn with the appearance of Maud Brewster and, the reason may be that it corresponded with a turning point in London's life. When he was halfway through writing the book in 1903, he deserted Bess [his first wife] for Charmian Kittredge. Charmian, gushy, flirtatious, an intellectual chatterbox with a fine seat on a horse and an energetic social gaiety, set her traps for London and snared him," (Walcutt, Jack London, p. 26.)
Franklin Walker says, "Much of The-Sea Wolf, one of the world's great sea novels, was written aboard a trim thirty-foot sloop named Spray, which London had bought with part of the two thousand dollars he had just received from The Call of the Wild. With a cabin big enough to serve as a galley and to sleep two, London made week-long trips up San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Delta, turning out his fifteen hundred words a day sitting on the hatch in the spring sunshine. In March 1904, almost a year later, while the novel was appearing serially in The Century Magazine, its adventuresome twenty-eight-year old author was nearly freezing in an open Japanese sampan, making his way up the west coast of Korea in sub-zero weather marked by squalls alternating with treacherous calms." (Franklin Walker, Introduction to The Sea-Wolf. New York: Signet Books, 1964), p. 377.
An excellent edition of the novel is that issued by Houghton Mifflin Co. (Riverside Edition), edited by Matthew Bruccoli, 1964.
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