Jack London was a native Californian who achieved worldwide acclaim as a powerful storyteller, a legendary public figure, and America's most commercially successful writer. Joseph Conrad acknowledged London's appeal when he wrote to the American writer on 10 September 1915, one year before London's death, praising him as "an accomplished fello w craftsman and a true brother in letters--of whose personality and art I have been intensely aware for many years." Throughout his life London cultivated and exploited his public persona as a romantic adventurer, war correspondent, political activist, and writer who based his fiction, to a great extent, on his own colorful and controversial life. Though the London of American folklore, myth, and popular legend often overs hadows London the artist and literary craftsman, many scholars and serious students since "the London Renaissance" of the mid 1960s have focused on London as a skilled writer with a highly refined...