he suicide idea, first advanced in print in Irving Stone's Sailor on Horseback, has been tenacious, as if suicide was more romantic, a more fitting death for a man of action than the sordid business of kidney failure. London, after all, wrote often of suicide. In a symposium on euthanasia published in the Medical Review of Reviews and quoted by Joan London, he stated, "Man possesses but one freedom, namely, the anticipation of the day of his death....I believe in the individual's right to cease to live."

Those searching for suicide clues in London's work point out that in The Little Lady of the Big House, the last novel published in his lifetime (written in 1913, the year Wolf House burned), the wife of a scientific rancher with a northern California domain of quarter million acres, is torn between her love for her husband and another man. She shoots herself, is revived by stimulants, then is given a large dose of morphine and slides into death.

Even in his earliest fiction there were suicidal themes and he loved the lines from Longfellow and often quoted them:

The lines were particularly poignant in Martin Eden, London's most ambitious and important novel. Written during the Snark voyage and published in 1909, Eden is a novel of disillusionment, of the struggles of a common, self-educated sailor to become a successful writer and how Martin's rise is also his fall, especially from his real world into an artificial "civilized" life he cannot abide.

In a shocking (for 1909) ending, Martin commits suicide.

The book is autobiographical; it is also fiction.

On the eve of his death, London made plans to meet his daughters for lunch in Oakland, a movie, and a sail on Lake Merritt. He had purchased rail tickets and made hotel reservations on November 21st for the trip to New York. There, he told friends, he hoped to find a correspondent assignment in Europe where the Great War was raging. He talked to his daughter Joan about his hope to visit Scandinavia and perhaps return to Japan to study their agricultural methods, and he gave his half-sister and Beauty Ranch manager Eliza Shepard instructions to be followed during his absence.

During the night of November 22-23, he was stricken by the unendurable pain of passing a kidney stone and reached for his drugs.

If quick suicide had been on his mind, he need not have waited for the effects of morphine sleep. He had a loaded .45 caliber Colt revolver in a holster suspended near his cot to be used to scare off varmints and trespassers.

On November 23, Jack London's body lay in a gray coffin in his study at the Beauty Ranch. The next day Eliza Shepard accompanied the body to the train station in Glen Ellen, then to Oakland where his daughters Joan and Bess, his first wife Bessie Maddern, and scores of friends waited. Jack's mother Flora, now age seventy-five, had been notified of her son's death but could not attend the funeral or burial.

He was cremated, his ashes placed in a copper urn. The funeral was simple, as he wished, with a short oration, the reading of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis," one of Jack's favorite poems, and a poem written for the occasion by George Sterling containing the lines:

On Sunday the 26th Sterling brought the urn back to the ranch where Charmian decorated it with ferns and primroses. The burial place had been selected by Jack years before, a knoll about a half-mile downhill from the cottage he and Charmian shared. There were already graves there, marked by plain wooden crosses, of two pioneer children, David Greenlaw, who died in 1876, the year of Jack's birth, and Lillie Greenlaw, who followed her brother in death a year later. London loved the silent place amidst brush and flowers and shaded by tall oaks and redwoods, and told Charmian, "If I should beat you to it, I wouldn't mind if you laid my ashes on the knoll where the Greenlaw children are buried. And roll over me a red boulder from the ruins of Wolf House."

The burial was unceremonial, attended by Charmian, Eliza and her son, a few of the ranch employees and old friends such as George Sterling. The copper urn was placed in the ground, sealed within a cement sarcophagus, and, as Sterling wrote, "Amid the profound silence of the on-lookers, a huge boulder—a great block of red lava long-pitted by time and enriched by the moss of uncounted years—was urged by roller and crowbar above the sepulcher."

Charmian London died in 1955 and her cremated remains were buried under the boulder with her hero. Four years after her death, the Shepard family gift-deeded thirty-nine acres of land, Charmian's House of Happy Walls, the Wolf House ruins and the gravesite, to the state of California.

The Jack London State Park is visited by an estimated seventy-five thousand visitors each year.