Jack London was the pen name of John Griffith Chaney, an American novelist, journalist and social activist. Enormously popular, London was one of the first American writers to become internationally famous and wealthy from his writing alone. Born in 1876, young Jack was the illegitimate child of Flora Wellman and William Chaney. Chaney, however, refused to accept that he was the boy's father and after his mother remarried Civil War veteran John London, Jack took his father's last name as his own. When Jack tried to reach out to his biological father and was rejected, he quit school at the University of California at Berkeley and headed off into the Klondike to try his luck as a fortune hunter.While London did not succeed in the gold fields (he, in fact, suffered from many health problems while in the Klondike), his experiences in the frozen north gave him plenty of fodder for the stories to come. When he returned to America, he began writing short stories and selling them to magazines, swiftly earning an impressive income. In 1903, he sold his book "The Call of the Wild" to The Saturday Evening Post for $750 and the book rights to Macmillan and the book became a huge publishing success. From then on, London enjoyed an almost unprecedented career as a popular writer.London alternated between stories of nature and adventure - such as "White Fang" and "The Sea Hawk" - and books about society and the future (even dabbling in science fiction) in such books as "The Iron Heel" and "The Scarlet Plague." London never stopped advocating for the rights of both workers and animals and was a fierce pro-union socialist.London also suffered from severe health issues including dysentery, uremia and late-stage alcoholism. In almost constant pain towards the end of his life, London became addicted to morphine and opium, ultimately dying from a number of complicating factors in 1916 at the age of forty.