Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer
    Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer
    Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer

    By Jack London

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Jack London was a writer, but more than that, he was an adventurer who wrote about his adventures. Growing up working class in San Francisco, London diligently scrounged out a life riding trains, pirating oysters, working on a sealing ship, and working at a cannery, all the while using his free time to hole up in libraries reading novels and travel books. A harrowing voyage aboard a sealing ship, where he and the crew were almost killed by a typhoon, convinced him to start writing stories.

    After a brief time on the east coast and a stint in the Yukon mining for gold, London returned to California. He published his stories in the Overland Monthly, which prompted him to become more disciplined in his writing. He published numerous novels over the years, including The Call of the Wild, a story about a dog who becomes a sled dog in the Yukon, The People of the Abyss, which heavily critiqued capitalism, and John Barleycorn, a memoiristic novel that detailed his struggles with alcoholism.

    With quotes from the array of Jack London’s writings, readers will get a sense of his life as well as a keen yearning for undertaking their own adventures.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJun 2, 2015
    ISBN9781632208910
    Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer
    Author

    Jack London

    Jack London (1876-1916) was not only one of the highestpaid and most popular novelists and short-story writers of his day, he was strikingly handsome, full of laughter, and eager for adventure on land or sea. His stories of high adventure and firsthand experiences at sea, in Alaska, and in the fields and factories of California still appeal to millions of people around the world.

    Read more from Jack London

    Related to Jack London on Adventure

    Related ebooks

    United States Travel For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Bookish Types

      Jun 6, 2021

      The Bookish Types
      9 min read

    • Article

      When Grief Is On The Menu

      Nov 6, 2017

      A photograph of a half-eaten sandwich is buried deep within my camera roll. Every now and then it will pop up as I scroll through pictures or when I am uploading new ones. I stop and breathe a little differently for a moment. I know the date without

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Books That Made My Father

      Jan 26, 2023

      There was much to do after my father died last year, following a prolonged bout with blood cancer. Not just the funeral arrangements but the other logistical matters: ridding my parents’ house of medical supplies, sorting through financial documents.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Have A Great Trip As A Solo Traveler In Retirement

      Sep 27, 2019

      When Paula Wright, now age 74, traveled around the world with her husband, they always encountered something that delighted them--rainbows. They weren't surprised to see one in Ireland, but they were amazed at sightings in unlikely places, such as th

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Critic Profile Rory Stewart

      Oct 26, 2023

      The Critic Profile Rory Stewart
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Mind on Fire

      Sep 1, 2020

      A Mind on Fire
      8 min read

    • Article

      Letter From The Founder

      Oct 12, 2018

      Letter From The Founder
      11 min read

    • Article

      'Underland' Connects Us To Dazzling Worlds Beneath Our Feet

      Jun 3, 2019

      The beauty of Robert Macfarlane's writing, and of the natural world it describes, is immense. His words also act as a warning, ensuring a recognition of human harms to the environment.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Healed Of Bladder Cancer

      Sep 16, 2019

      In 2014, blood appeared in my urine. The scan showed a dark, dead kidney on the right side of my body. It was cancer. My journey had begun. A urologist and a surgeon removed my kidney, urethra, bladder, half of the adrenal glands, and all other gland

      3 min read

    • Article

      Top 5 Books By George Orwell That Aren’t 1984 Or Animal Farm

      Jan 25, 2021

      Orwell’s funniest novel is a spiky, semi-autobiographical satire of the London literary scene and thwarted ambition. Gordon Comstock, an unsuccessful poet terrified of sliding into bourgeois conformity, is a hilarious misanthrope and forerunner of th

      1 min read

    • Article

      Do Great Books Still Matter? For Roosevelt Montás, They Are Essential.

      Dec 15, 2021

      The study of the Great Books – a fluctuating list of predominantly Western texts hailed by academics – has long been criticized as elitist, sexist, and Eurocentric. But Roosevelt Montás is coming to the books’ defense. The Columbia University alumnus

      3 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023

      Jan 12, 2023

      Nick Ripatrazone spotlights the best poetry collections of Q1. The post Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Meet David Allen Sibley

      Sep 1, 2020

      David Allen Sibley (RIGHT) has loved birds since he was a young boy. He is an illustrator and an author of numerous books about birds. The Sibley Guide to Birds is considered one of the best field guides for North America. His new book, What It’s Lik

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Planet in Peril

      Mar 5, 2018

      THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World BY CHARLES C. MANN Knopf, 640 pp., $28.95 ONE OF THE PLEASURES of reading Charles C. Mann’s new book, The Wizard and the Prophet, is the simpl

      5 min read

    • Article

      Aelfred’s Britain

      Jul 12, 2018

      Aelfred’s Britain
      2 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2023

      In the popular belief, ghosts are a selecting tribe, avoiding millions, speaking to one. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Demonology,” North American Review, 1877 Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose he

      3 min read

    • Article

      Ready Player Two

      Dec 30, 2020

      Ready Player Two
      2 min read

    • Article

      Human Connections Light Up 'This Brilliant Darkness'

      Feb 20, 2020

      Journalist Jeff Sharlet's new book is a memoir told through images and stories of other people; it grew out of a series of Instagram posts about night shift workers he met and photographed.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Creative Nonfiction

      Dec 15, 2020

      EDITOR Lee Gutkind MANAGING EDITOR Hattie Fletcher SENIOR EDITOR Chad Vogler SECTION EDITOR Dinty W. Moore Exploring the Boundaries EDITORIAL INTERNS & FACT CHECKERS Sarah Capdeville Stephanie Dinkmeyer Zoe Fowler READERS Stephanie Bane Becky Bosshar

      1 min read

    • Article

      For Further Reading

      Dec 15, 2020

      Here are some moments of clarity that … Are strong but unspoken: From “CHOP SUEY” by IRA SUKRUNGRUANG My mother grabbed my hand and took one step toward the man. In that instant, I saw in her face the same resolve she had when she spanked, the same r

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Jack London on Adventure

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Jack London on Adventure - Jack London

      THE ARTIST AS ADVENTURER

      There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

      —from The Call of the Wild

      You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

      He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

      In a letter to Cloudesley Johns:

      A man without courage is to me the most despicable thing under the sun, a travesty on the whole scheme of creation.

      And yet he wanted to live. It was unreasonable that he should die after all he had undergone. Fate asked too much of him. And, dying, he declined to die. It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of Death he defied Death and refused to die.

      —from Love of Life

      Don’t quit your job in order to write unless there is none dependent upon you.

      Don’t dash off a six-thousand word story before breakfast.

      Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story rather than dissipate it over a dozen.

      Don’t loaf and invite inspiration: light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

      Set yourself a stint, and see that you do that stint every day.

      Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers.

      Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.

      And work. Find out about this earth, this universe . . .

      —from Getting into Print

      I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

      Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

      In a letter to Ethel Jennings:

      You wrote your story at white heat. Hell is kept warm by unpublished manuscripts written at white heat. Develop your locality. Get in your local color. Develop your characters. Make your characters real to your readers. Get out of yourself and into your readers’ minds and know what impression your readers are getting from your written words. Always remember that you are not writing for yourself but that you are writing for your readers.

      All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming—ay, of forming and forgetting.

      You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

      Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds? Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.

      —from The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

      In a letter to Charles Warren Stoddard, 21 August 1903:

      I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.

      Naturally, my reading early bred in me a desire to write, but my manner of life prevented me attempting it. I have had no literary help or advice of any kind—just been sort of hammering around in the dark till I knocked holes through here and there and caught glimpses of daylight.

      —from autobiographic material submitted to Houghton Mifflin and Co.

      The thought of work was repulsive. I didn’t care if I

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1