Biographical Sketch of Dan Wichlan

aniel J. Wichlan was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri where he attended parochial elementary and high schools. He was the sixth of seven children and his father, who was an avid reader, gave Dan the gift of reading in the form of a library card and a collection of Jack London short stories for his tenth birthday. After completing high school, Dan enrolled at St. Louis University where he received a Bachelors Degree in Industrial Engineering. Upon graduation he was awarded a teaching fellowship at Kansas State University where he earned a Masters Degree in Industrial Engineering.

After beginning a career in the financial services industry in St. Louis, Dan and his wife and four children relocated to San Francisco in 1976 where he was an information systems executive with both Bank of America and Charles Schwab and Company. In 1991 he left the financial services industry and helped to found and manage three different Internet related companies. He retired from the information systems profession in 1999.

Dan now lives in Pleasant Hill, California (a former hometown of Joan London), a suburb of San Francisco where he pursues several life long avocations including his interest in Jack London. He has also embarked on a second education — this time in the liberal arts, which was not included in his earlier engineering training. He regularly attends a local community college where he has taken courses in literature, creative writing, psychology, filmmaking, film history, astronomy, and art history. He has a large film library and he has written film criticism for the Internet Movie Database. He also collects art and American literature first editions that include a complete set of Jack London first editions.

Dan's interest in Jack London began in his childhood with London's short stories and then later with his novels and finally with London's nonfiction. Dan is a member of both the Jack London Foundation and the Jack London Society. He has given papers on both London's fiction and nonfiction at the Jack London Symposiums and the Popular Culture Association conferences. He has published articles in the "Jack London Journal" and the "Jack London Foundation Newsletter" on London's nonfiction. He currently has an article pending publication that is an analysis of parallelisms in short stories of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.

He is working on a novella that recounts a hypothetical encounter between Jack London and Babe Ruth. London had been invited by the "New York Evening Star" to cover the 1916 World Series between Brooklyn and Boston in which Babe Ruth pitched for Boston. London had accepted the sports writing assignment but had to cancel because of a lawsuit over water rights on his ranch. The novella develops the premise that, had London covered the 1916 World Series, he likely would had met Ruth.

Dan's other passion is baseball. He is an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan.