THE SEA WOLF is Jack London's powerful and gripping saga of Humphrey van Weydon, captured by a seal-hunting ship and now an unwilling sailor under its dreaded captain, Wolf Larsen. The men who sailed with Larsen were treacherous outcasts, but the captain himself was the legendary Sea Wolf--a violent brute of a man.
Jack London was a worshipper of the strong and virtuous hero, and a firm believer in the inevitable triumph of good. The master storyteller nowhere demonstrates this theme more vividly than in this classic American tale of peril and adventure, good and evil.
American novelist and short story writer, was born in San Francisco in 1876, illegitimate son of Flora Wellman (later London) and W. H. Chaney, a man London never knew. He s4oent his adolescence as an oyster pirate, a seaman, a Yukon prospector, and a tramp. These experiences, while giving him a lifelong sympalhy with the working class, did not prevent London from acquiring an education. Ina Coolbrith,poet laureate of California and a librarian, Introduced the poy to literature, lending him Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina from her private library.
After marriage and a year at the University of California,ondon decided to devote himself entirely to writing. Kipling and Stevenson were his heroes. He became an enthusiastic believer in socialism. Yet at the same time he was also attracted to Nietzsche"s doctrine of the superman who ruled the slave mass"---a theory he claimed later to repudiate in The Sea Wolf(l904).
