London "recalled that the first time he got drunk he was five years old," notes Dyer. "In truth, I had been poisoned," declares London. From early childhood, London was a heavy drinker, often prone to binges. He recalled nearly drowning while drunk when he was an adolescent—floating off in the currents of San Francisco Bay only to be fortuitously saved. His abandoning his life as oyster pirate and wharf rat was motivated in part by the realization that the heavy drinking associated with that life would kill him at an early age.

Eventually, his lifelong battle with alcohol resulted in his writing John Barleycorn (1913), a story of alcohol addiction that remains a landmark for its realism.

Alcoholism was not the only legacy of London's childhood of hard labor and little education. Dyer emphasizes how London's work in factories and railroad yards left him with...