Jack London

January 12

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On this date in 1876, novelist Jack London was born in San Francisco. The short-lived adventurer sought gold in the Klondike rush, traveled, worked for newspapers, and found fame as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, humanistic classics with dog protagonists. London, an admirer of Marx and Nietzsche, called himself "a hopeless materialist." D. 1916.

“I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.”

—Jack London, quote from Who's Who in Hell, compiled by Warren Allen Smith