The downtrodden, the broken, the crooked, the washed-out . . . all of them, London saw, had tales worth the telling. Whether speaking of diamond thieves reveling over ill-gotten gains or of slaves suffering in a dystopian twenty-sixth-century America, London shows a deep understanding of the power of hope -- and the implacable force of fate. "We never win," as one characters says. "Sometimes we think we win . . . a little pleasantry of the gods."

Author Biography

John Griffith "Jack" London (1876 - 1916) was an American novelist, journalist and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North" and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.