Asprey, Matthew

Although born in 1876 near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco, Jack London lived much of his childhood eight miles across the bay in Oakland. From 1868 the city's Long Wharf was the last stop of the Transcontinental and Central Pacific Railroads. Oakland was a rough and vital place. As a child, London fed his tremendous appetite for reading at the Oakland Public Library. His early teens were spent at gruelling labour in a cannery. In his memoir of alcoholism, John Barleycorn (1913), London tells how he escaped that servitude to became an oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay with his own