{"title":"Library Of America Jack London Edition","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"jack-london-novels-and-social-writings-loa-7-book-jack-london-9780940450066","title":"Jack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7)","description":"By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in \u003ci\u003eThe People of the Abyss\u003c\/i\u003e to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of \u003ci\u003eThe Iron Heel\u003c\/i\u003e, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London's own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled Revolution. London's prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when \u003ci\u003eThe Iron Heel\u003c\/i\u003e first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Whether he is recollecting, in \u003ci\u003eThe Road\u003c\/i\u003e, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in \u003ci\u003eMartin Eden\u003c\/i\u003e, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir \u003ci\u003eJohn Barleycorn\u003c\/i\u003e, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Though he is outraged in \u003ci\u003eThe People of the Abyss\u003c\/i\u003e by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, \u003ci\u003eThe Call of the Wild\u003c\/i\u003e (in the companion volume, \u003ci\u003eNovels and Stories\u003c\/i\u003e), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. \u003ci\u003eThe Iron Heel\u003c\/i\u003e, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London's warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49680305094929,"sku":"CIN0940450062G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49803441176849,"sku":"CIN0940450062A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51739730739473,"sku":"CIN0940450062VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53022963368209,"sku":"GOR005273740","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0940450062.jpg?v=1751203391"},{"product_id":"jack-london-novels-and-stories-loa-6-book-jack-london-9780940450059","title":"Jack London: Novels and Stories (LOA #6)","description":"This Library of America volume of Jack London's best-known work is filled with thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often works itself out through violence. London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time (which included the depressions of the 1890s and the beginnings of World War One), and he remains one of the most widely read of all American writers.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Call of the Wild\u003c\/i\u003e (1903), perhaps the best novel ever written about animals, traces a dog's sudden entry into the wild and the education necessary for his survival in the ways of the wolf pack. Like many of London's stories, this one is inspired by the early deprivations of his own pathetically short life: the primitive conditions of life as an oyster pirate in San Francisco; the restless existence of a hobo; the isolation of a prison inmate; the exertion of a laborer in the Oakland slums; and the frustration of a failed prospector for gold in the Alaskan Klondike.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eWhite Fang\u003c\/i\u003e (1906), in which a wolf-dog becomes domesticated out of love for a man, is apparently the reverse side of the process found in \u003ci\u003eThe Call of the Wild\u003c\/i\u003e, yet for many readers its moments of greatest authenticity are those which suggest that, in actual practice, civilization is pretty much a dog's life for everyone, of \"hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony.\"\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Though London was a reader of Marx and Nietzsche and an avowed socialist, he doubted that socialism could ever be put into practice and was convinced of the necessity for a brutal individualism. He thought of \u003ci\u003eThe Sea-Wolf\u003c\/i\u003e (1904), the story of Wolf Larsen and his crew of outcasts on the lawless Alaskan seas, as \"an attack upon the superman philosophy,\" but the Captain is far more memorable than any of the book's civilized characters. London is an immensely exciting writer partly because the conflicts in his thinking tend to enhance rather than hinder the romantic and thrilling turns of his plots.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The stories of the Klondike, which are based on his personal experiences and the stories of California, Mexico, and the South Seas, span the whole of London's career as a writer. He is one of the great storytellers in American literature, and his politics, with all their passion and contradiction, come to life through the vigor and red-blooded energy of his prose.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eLIBRARY OF AMERICA\u003c\/b\u003e is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49797158666513,"sku":"CIN0940450054G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50227055984913,"sku":"CIN0940450054VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50775514284305,"sku":"GOR014067535","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009546977553,"sku":"NIN9780940450059","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51412357480721,"sku":"CIN0940450054A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52628943929617,"sku":"GOR003220740","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0940450054.jpg?v=1754649129"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/library-of-america-jack-london-edition-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}