Jack London, Sailor on Horseback A Biographical Novel

These are the principal revelations that Mr. Stone offers in his biographical novel, which follows London's career from its beginning in Oakland, where he grew up as an underprivileged youngster, through hardships of one sort or another and many adventurous experiences in Alaska, the Far East, the South Pacific and the slums of Whitechapel to his eventual immense success as a writer, who earned big money with a prolific pen. He traces London's struggle to obtain an education, showing how he contrived to equip himself intellectually for a career of literary triumph, which, from the first, he felt sure would one day be his. Of formal training he had very little, at any time, and did very well without it. If ever an American writer was the product of the public library system, and his own indomitable will to learn, that writer was Jack London.