A prolific and enduringly popular author--and an icon of American fiction--Jack London is a rewarding choice for inclusion in classrooms from middle school to graduate programs. London's biography and the role played by celebrity have garnered considerable attention, but the breadth of his personal experiences and political views and the many historical and cultural contexts that shaped his work are key to gaining a nuanced view of London's corpus of works, as this volume's wide-ranging perspectives and examples attest. The first section of this volume, "Materials," surveys the many resources available for teaching London, including editions of his works, sources for his photography, and audiovisual aids. In part 2, "Approaches," contributors recommend practices for teaching London's works through the lenses of socialism and class, race, gender, ecocriticism and animal studies, theories of evolution, legal theory, and regional history, both in frequently taught texts such as The Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire," and Martin Eden and in his lesser-known works.

Bring The Classics To Life. These novels have been adapted into 10 short chapters that will excite the reluctant reader as well as the enthusiastic one. Key words are defined and used in context. Multiple-choice questions require the student to recall specific details, sequence the events, draw inferences from story context, develop another name for the chapter, and choose the main idea. Let the Classics introduce Kipling, Stevenson, and H.G. Wells. Your students will embrace the notion of Crusoe's lonely reflections, the psychological reactions of a Civil War soldier at Chancellorsville, and the tragedy of the Jacobite Cause in 18th Century Scotland. In our society, knowledge of these Classics is a cultural necessity. Improves fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

"With his novels, journalism, short stories, political activism, and travel writing, Jack London established himself as one of the most prolific and diverse authors of the twentieth century. Covering London's biography, cultural context, and the various genres in which he wrote, The Oxford Handbook of Jack London is the definitive reference work on the author" --

Jack London (1876–1916) lived a life of excess by conventional standards. Daring, outspoken, politically radical, amazingly imaginative, and emotionally complicated, the author of literary classics such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf emerges in Kenneth K. Brandt’s new biography as a vital and flawed embodiment of conflicting yearnings. London’s exuberant energies propelled him out of the working class to become a world-famous writer by the age of twenty-seven—after stints as a child laborer, an oyster pirate, a Pacific seaman, and a convict. He wrote extensively about his travels to Japan, the Yukon, the slums of London’s East End, Korea, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Swiftly paced, intellectually engaging, and richly dramatic, London’s writings—bolstered by their wildly clashing philosophical viewpoints derived from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin—continue to engross readers with their depictions of primal urges, raw sensations, and reformist politics.

Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine. This study explores how London's Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America's most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and To Build a Fire- are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London's key subjects-the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility-are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin,

Fifty timeless novels in one collection, plus additional bonus classics: The Oresteia by Aeschylus Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Little Women by Louisa May Alcott The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly The Brontë Sisters by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud The Iliad by Homer The Odyssey by Homer The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories by Jack London The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham All My Sons by Arthur Miller The Crucible by Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe by Fernando Pessoa Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck East of Eden by John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Short Novels of John Steinbeck by John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck Dracula by Bram Stoker Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Three Novels of New York by Edith Wharton Gray When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The first book-length study of London as a maritime writer Jack London’s fiction has been studied previously for its thematic connections to the ocean, but Jack London and the Sea marks the first time that his life as a writer has been considered extensively in relationship to his own sailing history and interests. In this new study, Anita Duneer claims a central place for London in the maritime literary tradition, arguing that for him romance and nostalgia for the Age of Sail work with and against the portrayal of a gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in urban or rural settings. The sea provides a dynamic setting for London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity: race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the maritime tradition spills over into texts that are not set at sea. Jack London and the Sea does not address all of London’s sea stories, but rather identifies key maritime motifs that influenced his creative process. Duneer’s critical methodology employs techniques of literary and cultural analysis, drawing on extensive archival research from a wealth of previously unpublished biographical materials and other sources. Duneer explores London’s immersion in the lore and literature of the sea, revealing the extent to which his writing is informed by travel narratives, sensational sea yarns, and the history of exploration, as well as firsthand experiences as a sailor in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. Organized thematically, chapters address topics that interested London: labor abuses on “Hell-ships” and copra plantations, predatory and survival cannibalism, strong seafaring women, and environmental issues and property rights from San Francisco oyster beds to pearl diving in the Paumotos. Through its examination of the intersections of race, class, and gender in London’s writing, Jack London and the Sea plumbs the often-troubled waters of his representations of the racial Other and positions of capitalist and colonial privilege. We can see the manifestation of these socioeconomic hierarchies in London’s depiction of imperialist exploitation of labor and the environment, inequities that continue to reverberate in our current age of global capitalism.