John Barleycorn," published in France under the title "The Cabaret of Last Chance," is a fictionalized autobiography. These alcoholic memories were intended to support the advocates of prohibition. As the soap opera in the Saturday Evening Post, all anti-alcoholics use it as a standard. Neither autobiography, nor memoirs, nor narrative, but at the same time, the narrator tells us how, throughout his life, a kind of double accompanied him permanently: John Barleycorn, who in America is the personification of the alcohol. Why drink, how, under what circumstances? Facts and gesture of whiskey,...

Resume Burning Daylight is a novel by Jack London which was one of the best-selling books of that year and it was London's best-selling book in his lifetime. The novel takes place in the Yukon Territory in 1893. The main character, nicknamed "Burning Daylight" was the most successful entrepreneur of the Alaskan Gold Rush. The story of an adventurer who went to Alaska and laid the foundations of his fortune before the gold hunters arrived. Bringing his fortunes to the States he is cheated out of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as...

The Red One" is a short story by Jack London. It was first published in the October 1918 issue of The Cosmopolitan, two years after London's death. The story was reprinted in the same year by MacMillan, in a collection of London's stories of the same name. The story is told from the perspective of a scientist called Bassett, who is on an expedition in the jungle of Guadalcanal to collect butterflies. The "Red One" of the title refers to a giant red sphere, of apparently extraterrestrial origin, that the headhunting natives worship as their god and to which they perform human sacrifices....

Summary The story begins with the birth of White-Fang, a wolf-dog. The novel follows the pack from which it comes and its first weeks of wild life, its struggle for life: eating or being eaten. Then he experiences life among the Indians; His master is called Castor-Gray. He meets other dogs and becomes an enemy with them, Lip-lip being his rival. But White Fang, proud and powerful, undergoes the wickedness of white men; In reaction, he becomes a fierce fighter. The story then becomes darker when it is exchanged at Beauty Smith against alcohol to become a beast of combat. Despite his many...

The Story Early 20th century. Martin Eden is a young Oakland sailor born in the shallows (as well as in ignorance and violence). His life is made up of adventures, travels, but also brutality and work. This is how he defends a young man in a brawl. He comes from the wealthy class and invites him to dinner to thank him. On this occasion Martin meets his sister Ruth Morse, delicate girl from a bourgeois family of which he falls in love. He decides to learn to conquer it. Little by little, first to please the girl he loves, then for real taste of study, he forges an encyclopedic culture and...

FOREWORD It is a misfortune to some fiction-writers that fiction and unveracity in the average person's mind mean one and the same thing. Several years ago I published a South Sea novel. The action was placed in the Solomon Islands. The action was praised by the critics and reviewers as a highly creditable effort of the imagination. As regards reality-they said there wasn't any. Of course, as every one knew, kinky-haired cannibals no longer obtained on the earth's surface, much less ran around with nothing on, chopping off one another's heads, and, on occasion, a white man's head as well. Now...

CHAPTER I-SOMETHING TO BE DONE He was a very sick white man. He rode pick-a-back on a woolly-headed, black-skinned savage, the lobes of whose ears had been pierced and stretched until one had torn out, while the other carried a circular block of carved wood three inches in diameter. The torn ear had been pierced again, but this time not so ambitiously, for the hole accommodated no more than a short clay pipe. The man-horse was greasy and dirty, and naked save for an exceedingly narrow and dirty loin-cloth; but the white man clung to him closely and desperately. At times, from weakness, his...

Plot summary The novel is based on the (fictional) "Everhard Manuscript" written by Avis Everhard which she hid and which was subsequently found centuries later. In addition, this novel has an introduction and series of (often lengthy) footnotes written from the perspective of scholar Anthony Meredith. Meredith writes from around 2600 AD or 419 B.O.M. (the Brotherhood of Man). Jack London writes at two levels, often having Meredith condescendingly correcting the errors of Everhard yet, at the same time, exposing the often incomplete understanding of this distant future perspective. Meredith's...

South Sea Tales (1911) is a collection of short stories written by Jack London. Most stories are set in island communities, like those of Hawaii, or are set aboard a ship. Extract: THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon...

Plot summary The novel The Valley of the Moon is a story of a working-class couple, Billy and Saxon Roberts, struggling laborers in Oakland at the Turn-of-the-Century, who left city life behind and searched Central and Northern California for suitable farmland to own. The book is notable for its scenes in which the proletarian hero enjoys fellowship with the artists' colony in Carmel, and he settles in the Valley of the Moon. Beginnings The book begins with Billy as a Teamster and Saxon working in a laundry. Billy has also boxed professionally with some success, but decided there was no...