Nineteen hundred was a good year for Jack London. When he compared his earnings of $2,534.13 for the year against the $780.00 he would have earned as a full-time mail carrier, he knew he had made a wise decision. In one year he had earned as much as he would have earned in three and a quarter years in the post office.

It was also a year of hard work. His records reveal that he submitted thirty new items as well as rewriting and resubmitting much of his past work. He was at the post office almost as much as if he worked there, mailing one or more manuscripts on each of 127 days to fifty-one different magazines, four newspapers, and three syndicates. Twenty-seven manuscripts were published, including sixteen short stories. There were only 108 rejections compared to the 266 he received in 1899.