In outlook, Jack London was closer to Cather and Dreiser than to James and closer to Turner than to Adams. But in his talent for turning personal adventures into remunerative art and culturally illuminating narrative, he resembles Buffalo Bill. Born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876, the illegitimate son of William Henry Chancy, an itinerant astrologer, and Flora Wellman, a spiritualist, London was named for his stepfather, John London. In 1886 his stepfather’s farm failed, and the family moved to Oakland, the workingman’s city of which another Oakland artist, Gertrude Stein, later said, “There is no there there.” But Stein had lived in Pennsylvania and Europe before her family moved to Oakland, and her privileged life had given her very different standards. The vacancies of Oakland were the closest thing to home that London ever found. At age fourteen, he quit public school and began spending his days working in a laundry and then a cannery, and his nights frequenting libraries and saloons or working in San Francisco Bay as an oyster pirate. Later, older and tougher, he signed on as an able-bodied seaman on the Sophie Sutherland, a sealer bound for the Siberian coast and Japan, and began a life of remarkable adventures. Later still, in 1901 and 1905, he tried to become Oakland’s first socialist mayor.

In 1894, one year after Adams’s trip to Chicago and Stein’s matriculation at Radcliffe College, London joined Kelley’s Industrial Army, a group of unemployed workers that marched with Coxey’s Army on Washington, hoping to force the government to help the unemployed.