Jack London
ISBN: 9781469625065
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The University of North Carolina Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Social ethics in literature.; Social problems in literature.; Authors American; Authors American;

In this persuasive reappraisal of Jack London, Tichi (Civic Passions) argues that the self-made man and bestselling author was also a dedicated social reformer. London was raised in poverty during America's Gilded Age-an era that Tichi describes in rich detail-and grew up sharply aware of the nation's gross inequities in wealth. He occasionally decried this situation publicly, but Tichi contends that his essays and fiction most effectively advocated change. She sometimes risks overinterpreting the extraliterary dimensions of London's fiction-are the overworked sled dogs in The Call of the Wild really "surrogates for mistreated industrial workers," and does the dictatorial captain of The Sea Wolf really stand in for "Gilded Age moguls who held the social order in their collective vise"?-but Tichi makes a compelling case for these books as having laid the foundation for London's more overtly political fiction: the Hawaian island stories, which criticized American imperialism; The Iron Heel, a futuristic dystopia about the rise of tyrannical oligarchy; and The Star Rover, an impassioned critique of the American penal system. Bolstering her analysis of London's writing with nuggets of progressive thinking mined from his correspondence, Tichi brings a fresh perspective to an author and thinker frequently dismissed as a mere writer of adventure fiction. 33 illus. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Cecelia Tichi is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and professor of American studies at Vanderbilt University. She is author of Civic Passions , Exposes and Excess , and Embodiment of a Nation .

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