«Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his books» Virginia Woolf warming up

MY FAVOURITE AMERICAN WRITER


«Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life,
every quality of his mind is written large in his books»
Virginia Woolf


WARMING UP
Do you prefer to read books or watch films? Why?
What was the last book that you read? Who is it by?
Why do you prefer reading his/ her books?
Does reading books influence your life?
How often do you read e-books?

Jack London is my favourite American writer. His life was one of unending toil. He began working at the age of eight. In the years that followed, he did a moan's work, though he was only a boy. By the time he was twenty-two, he had lived more than most people did in fifty years. He had worked on ships and in factories; he had travelled across the ocean on ships as a sailor, he had tramped from San Francisco to New York with an army of unemployed and back through Canada to Vancouver...

Jack London was born in San Francisco in the family of impoverished farmer. In childhood he got to know misery and oppression. But he was interested in reading and had studied the great masters of literature-Flaubert, Tolstoy and Kipling.
In 1896 gold was discovered in Alaska, and together with thousands of other men, London rushed to the new territory. He brought no gold back with him, but he found something better than the yellow metal. The wonderful stories which he wrote on his return are based on the life he lived and on what he saw and heard in the frozen North. The collection of stories, "Children of the Frost", "The Son of the Wolf ", and "Love of Life" are gripping narra­tives of Man's heroic struggle with Nature. In the story "The Law of Life", he says, "To life she (Nature) set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law was death". This task and law are clearly seen in the story "The White Silence", in which, although Mason is crushed by Nature, his son, soon to be born, will live.
Jack London is not pessimistic in this story, nor in any of his works. A man may lose his own life in the struggle with nature, but his life goes on, and Man, by the strength of his body and will is, in the end, the conqueror of Nature.
His own experience in life had given him an understanding of the injustice and cruelty, and his works of this period of life reflect his deep interest in social problems.
In his great works, "The Iron Heel" and "Martin Eden", London treats problems of the individual and society. For though he was a real fighter, he never succeeded in freeing himself completely from the influence of bourgeois culture.
Jack London's realism is combined with sympathy and love for Man in his struggle for life. It is this realism and humanism that made his writings as living and fresh today as they were at the beginning of the century.