The Sea Wolf By Jack London

Alex MacLean was the inspiration for the title character in Jack London's bestselling novel The Sea-Wolf. Originally from Cape Breton, MacLean sailed to the Pacific side of North America when he was twenty-one and worked there for thirty-five years as a sailor and sealer. His achievements and escapades while in the Victoria fleet in the 1880s laid the foundation for his status as a folk hero. But this biography reveals more than the construction of a legend. Don MacGillivray opens a window onto the sealing dispute brought the United States and Britain to the brink of war, with Canadian sealing interests frequently enmeshed in espionage, scientific debate, diplomatic negotiations, and vexing questions of maritime and environmental law.

The Sea Wolf is Jack London’s powerful and gripping saga of Humphrey Van Weyden, captured by a seal-hunting ship and now an unwilling sailor under its dreaded captain, Wolf Larsen. The men who sailed with Larsen were treacherous outcasts, but the captain himself was the legendary Sea Wolf–a violent brute of a man. Jack London was a worshipper of the strong and virtuous hero, and a firm believer in the inevitable triumph of good. The master storyteller nowhere demonstrates this theme more vividly than in this classic American tale of peril and adventure, good and evil.

This 100th Anniversary Edition presents the timeless tale of Humphrey Van Weyden, pressed into service aboard the seal-hunting Ghost, led by the brutal, enigmatic captain Wolf Larsen. This volume also includes four of London's acclaimed short stories.

I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth's credit. He kept a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain. When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty existence in the city and to toil incessantly. Had it not been my custom to run up to see him every Saturday afternoon and to stop over till Monday morning, this particular January Monday morning would not have found me afloat on San Francisco Bay.

"The Sea-Wolf" is a 1904 psychological adventure about a literary critic and survivor of an ocean collision, who comes under the dominance of Wolf Larsen, the powerful and amoral sea captain who rescues him. A deranged and abusive sea captain perpetrates a shipboard atmosphere of increasing violence that ultimately boils into mutiny, shipwreck, and a desperate confrontation... Jack London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of 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.

Timeless tales of the sea, of life in the Yukon, of life in the far reaches of unexplored lands and even of life in prehistoric times, all to be found in this wide ranging compendium of the works of London. They are reproduced, in most cases, from the actual turn of the century magazine pages in which they first appeared (along with the original illustrations). The modern day reader will experience the same sense of excitement and fascination that his forefathers did in reading these dramatic tales of life and adventure.

JACK LONDON

Featuring an appendix of discussion questions, this Diversion Classics edition is ideal for use in book groups and classrooms. In Jack London’s most deeply psychological of adventures, literary critic Humphrey van Weyden is rescued from a ferry collision, only to be enlisted in the crew of a hunting schooner, The Ghost. One day with his mysterious savior is enough to know he’s been cursed, and now must rely on his intellect and cunning, but also brute force and untapped reservoirs of violence within if he is to usurp the brutal captain of a ship seemingly destined for a watery grave.