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John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916)〔"(London, Jack )". ''Encyclopædia Britannica Online'' Library Edition. Retrieved 2011-10-05.〕〔''(Dictionary of American Biography Base Set )''. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2006.〕 was an American author, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.〔(1910) "Specialty of Short-story Writing," The Writer, XXII, January–December 1910, p. 9: "There are eight American writers who can get $1000 for a short story—Robert W. Chambers, Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, O. Henry, Booth Tarkington, John Fox, Jr., Owen Wister, and Mrs. Burnett." $1,000 in 1910 dollars is roughly equivalent to $ today〕 Some of his most famous works include ''The Call of the Wild'' and ''White Fang'', both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in ''The Sea Wolf''. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel ''The Iron Heel'', his non-fiction exposé ''The People of the Abyss'', and ''The War of the Classes''. == Family == Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.〔Wellman, Joshua Wyman ''Descendants of Thomas Wellman'' (1918) Arthur Holbrook Wellman, Boston, p. 227〕 Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist, claiming to channel the spirit of a Sauk chief Black Hawk.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 The Book of Jack London )〕 Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe London's father was astrologer William Chaney.〔: "What supports Flora's naming Chaney as the father of her son are, first, the indisputable fact of their cohabiting at the time of his conception, and second, the absence of any suggestion on the part of her associates that another man could have been responsible... () unless DNA evidence is introduced, whether or not William Chaney was the biological father of Jack London cannot be decided.... Chaney would, however, be considered by her son and his children as their ancestor."〕 Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown. Most San Francisco civil records were destroyed by the extensive fires that followed the 1906 earthquake; nobody knows what name appeared on her son's birth certificate. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to London's mother Flora Wellman as having been his "wife"; he also cites an advertisement in which Flora called herself "Florence Wellman Chaney". According to Flora Wellman's account, as recorded in the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. When she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. After giving birth, Flora turned the baby over for care to Virginia Prentiss, an African-American woman and former slave. She was a major maternal figure throughout London's life. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, and brought her baby John, later known as Jack, to live with the newly married couple. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London completed public grade school. In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney responded that he could not be London's father because he was impotent; he casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted on an abortion. Chaney concluded by saying that he was more to be pitied than London. London was devastated by his father's letter; in the months following, he quit school at Berkeley and went to the Klondike during the gold rush boom. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jack London」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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