Great American Stories

My latest American read has been the collected works of Jack London. Again, I turned to Canterbury Classics for a leather bound addition to my heirloom collection. Still can’t get over how these books feel in your hands and how they look.

John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. These stories weren't included in this book

While I sure as heck don’t agree with London’s politics, it’s easy to see why he was so successful.

From hard-edged adventures in the Klondike territory to harrowing experiences on the South Seas, Jack London’s three most popular novels form the basis of this collection. Popular short stories round out this beautiful leather-bound volume that will be a treasured addition to any home library. You’ll enjoy hours of reading infused with the romance, hopes, and frustrations of one of the world’s most widely read authors.

Some of you probably read White Fang or Call of the Wild in school, but this collection contains some of London’s lesser known stories. Those of you who did will remember that London really speaks to the savagery of man, beast, and nature. With many of his stories being set in the Klondike some are also set in the South Pacific.

I thought it was a really great collection about that specific time and place in American history. His books are peculiarly thought provoking and will have you examining your own nature as you are immersed in situations where man and beast find themselves battling their own nature as well as their environment.

Even if you’ve read some of these, you’ll enjoy reading them again. And you’ll enjoy the rest of his stories just the same.