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Jack London

Jack London

Jack London, probably born John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and over fifty other books.

Personal background

Jack London's biological father was astrologer William Chaney. Chaney was in fact a distinguished and respectable figure; according to Clarice Stasz, "From the viewpoint of serious astrologers today, Chaney is a major figure who shifted the practice from quackery to a more rigorous method." Jack London did not learn of Chaney's paternity until adulthood. In 1897 he wrote to Chaney and received a letter in which Chaney stated flatly "I was never married to Flora Wellman," and that he was "impotent" during the period in which they lived together and "cannot be your father." Whether the marriage was, in fact, legalized is unknown. Most San Francisco civil records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. (For the same reason, it is not known with certainty what name appeared on his birth certificate). Stasz notes that in his memoirs Chaney refers to Jack London's mother Flora Wellman, as having been his "wife." Stasz also notes an advertisement in which Flora calls herself "Florence Wellman Chaney."

Early life

Jack London was born in San Francisco, California. He was essentially self-educated. In 1883 he found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa, which describes an unschooled Italian peasant child who achieves fame as an opera composer. He credited this as the seed of his literary aspiration. After graduating from grammar school in 1889, Jack London began working from twelve to eighteen hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out of this gruelling labor, he borrowed money from his black foster mother Jennie Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate himself. In John Barleycorn he claims to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie. After a few months his sloop became damaged beyond repair. He switched to the side of the law and became a member of the California Fish Patrol. In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland, bound for the coast of Japan. When he returned, the country was in the grip of the panic of '93 and Oakland was swept by labor unrest. After gruelling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly's industrial army and began his career as a tramp. In 1894, he spent thirty days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo. In The Road, he wrote:

"Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say 'unprintable'; and in justice I must also say 'unthinkable'. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them."

A pivotal event was his discovery in 1895 of the Oakland Public Library and a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith (who later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community). After many experiences as a hobo, sailor, and member of Kelly's Army he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School, where he contributed a number of articles to the high school's magazine, The Aegis. His first published work was "Typhoon off the coast of Japan", an account of his sailing experiences. Jack London desperately wanted to attend the University of California and, in 1896 after a summer of intense cramming, did so; but financial circumstances forced him to leave in 1897 and he never graduated. Biographer Russ Kingman says that "there is no record that Jack ever wrote for student publications" there. While living at his rented villa on Lake Merritt in Oakland, London met poet George Sterling and in time they became best of friends. In 1902 Sterling helped London find a home closer to his own in nearby Piedmont. In his letters London addressed Sterling as "Greek" owing to his aquiline nose and classical profile, and signed them as "Wolf." London was later to depict Sterling as Russ Brissenden in his autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) and as Mark Hall in The Valley of the Moon (1913). In later life Jack London was a polymath with wide-ranging interests and a personal library of 15,000 volumes.

Early literary career (1898-1900)

library] On July 25, 1897, London and his brother in law James Shepard sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he would later set his first successful stories. London's time in the Klondike, however, was quite detrimental to his health. Like so many others malnourished while involved in the Klondike Gold Rush, he developed scurvy. His gums became swollen, eventually leading to the loss of his four front teeth. A constant gnawing pain affected his abdomen and leg muscles, and his face was stricken with sores. Fortunately for him and others who were suffering with a variety of medical ills, a Father William Judge, "The Saint of Dawson", had a facility in Dawson which provided shelter, food and any available medicine. London's health recovered, but it was a unique twist of fate that London's life was perhaps saved by a Jesuit priest, since London was an agnostic. London survived the hardships of the Klondike, and these struggles inspired what is often called his best short story, "To Build a Fire", originally published in 1902 (London completed a final draft of the story, which was published in 1908.) The story concerned a Klondike prospector's stubborn futility in ignoring the dangers of nature, and in the end freezing to death when he is unable to build a simple fire that could save his life. London personally could probably closely identify himself with the man in the story, and must have seen this type of human folly many times in real life while in the Klondike. His landlords in Dawson were two Yale and Stanford educated mining engineers Marshall and Louis Bond. Their father Judge Hiram Bond was a wealthy mining investor. The Bonds, especially Hiram, were active Republicans. Marshall Bond's diary mentions friendly sparring on political issues as a camp pastime. Jack left Oakland a believer in the work ethic with a social conscience and socialist leanings and returned to become an active proponent of socialism. He also concluded that his only hope of escaping the work trap was to get an education and "sell his brains." Throughout his life he saw writing as a business, his ticket out of poverty, and, he hoped, a means of beating the wealthy at their own game. On returning to Oakland in 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel, Martin Eden. His first published story was the fine and frequently anthologized "To the Man On Trail." When The Overland Monthly offered him only $5 for it—and was slow paying—Jack London came close to abandoning his writing career. In his words, "literally and literarily I was saved" when The Black Cat accepted his story, "A Thousand Deaths," and paid him $40—the "first money I ever received for a story." Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public, and a strong market for short fiction. In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, the equivalent of about $75,000 today. His career was well under way. Among the works he sold to magazines was a short story known as either "Batarde" or "Diable" in two editions of the same basic story. A cruel French Canadian brutalizes his dog. The dog out of revenge causes his death. London was criticized for depicting a dog as an embodiment of evil. He told some of his critics that man's actions are the main cause of the behavior of their animals and he would show this in another short story. This short story for the Saturday Evening Post "The Call of the Wild" ran away in length. The story begins on an estate in Santa Clara and features a St. Bernard/Collie mix named Buck. In fact the opening scene is a description of the Bond family farm and Buck is based on a dog he was lent in Dawson by his landlords. London visited Marshall Bond in California having run into him again at a political lecture in San Francisco in 1901.

First marriage (1900-1904)

Jack London married Bess Maddern on April 7th, 1900, the same day The Son of the Wolf was published. Bess had been part of his circle of friends for a number of years. Clarice Stasz (2001) says "Both acknowledged publicly that they were not marrying out of love, but from friendship and a belief that they would produce sturdy children." Russ Kingman (1979) says "they were comfortable together.... Jack had made it clear to Bessie that he did not love her, but that he liked her enough to make a successful marriage." During the marriage, Jack London continued his friendship with Anna Strunsky, co-authoring The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary novel contrasting romantic love with scientific love. Anna, writing "Dane Kempton's" letters, arguing for a romantic view of marriage, while Jack, writing "Herbert Wace's" letters, argued for a scientific view, based on Darwinism and eugenics. In the novel, his fictional character contrasts two women he has known:

[The first was] a mad, wanton creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up... [The second was] a proud-breasted woman, the perfect mother, made preeminently to know the lip clasp of a child. You know the kind, the type. "The mothers of men," I call them. And so long as there are such women on this earth, that long may we keep faith in the breed of men. The wanton was the Mate Woman, but this was the Mother Woman, the last and highest and holiest in the hierarchy of life.

Wace declares:

I purpose to order my affairs in a rational manner....Wherefore I marry Hester Stebbins. I am not impelled by the archaic sex madness of the beast, nor by the obsolescent romance madness of later-day man. I contract a tie which reason tells me is based upon health and sanity and compatibility. My intellect shall delight in that tie.

Analyzing why he "was impelled toward the woman" he intends to marry, Wace says

it was old Mother Nature crying through us, every man and woman of us, for progeny. Her one unceasing and eternal cry: PROGENY! PROGENY! PROGENY!

In real life, Jack's pet name for Bess "Mother-Girl" and Bess's for Jack was "Daddy-Boy." Their first child, Joan, was born on January 15th, 1901, and their second, Bessie (later called Becky), on October 20, 1902. Captions to pictures in photo album, reproduced in part in Joan London's memoir, "Jack London and Her Daughters," published posthumously, show Jack London's unmistakable happiness and pride in his children. But the marriage itself was under continuous strain. Kingman (1979) says that by 1903 "the breakup... was imminent.... Bessie was a fine woman, but they were extremely incompatible. There was no love left. Even companionship and respect had gone out of the marriage." Nevertheless, "Jack was still so kind and gentle with Bessie that when Cloudsley Johns was a house guest in February of 1903 he didn't suspect a breakup of their marriage." According to Joseph Noel (1940), "Bessie was the eternal mother. She lived at first for Jack, corrected his manuscripts, drilled him in grammar, but when the children came she lived for them. Herein was her greatest honor and her first blunder." Jack complained to Noel and George Sterling that "she's devoted to purity. When I tell her morality is only evidence of low blood pressure, she hates me. She'd sell me and the children out for her damned purity. It's terrible. Every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won't let me be in the same room with her if she can help it." On July 24th, 1903, Jack London told Bessie he was leaving and moved out; during 1904 Jack and Bess negotiated the terms of a divorce, and the decree was granted on November 11, 1904 (Kingman, 1979).

Accusations of plagiarism

Jack London was accused of plagiarism at numerous times during his career. He was vulnerable, not only because he was such a conspicuous and successful writer, but also because of his methods of working. In a letter to Elwyn Hoffman he wrote "expression, you see—with me—is far easier than invention." He purchased plots for stories and novels from the young Sinclair Lewis. And he used incidents from newspaper clippings as material on which to base stories. Egerton R. Young claimed that The Call of the Wild was taken from his book My Dogs in the Northland. Jack London's response was to acknowledge having used it as a source; he claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking him. In July, 1902, two pieces of fiction appeared within the same month: Jack London's "Moon-Face," in the San Francisco Argonaut, and Frank Norris's "The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock," in Century. Newspapers paralleled the stories, which London characterizes as "quite different in manner of treatment, [but] patently the same in foundation and motive." Jack London explained that both writers had based their stories on the same newspaper account. Subsequently it was discovered that a year earlier, one Charles Forrest McLean had published another fictional story based on the same incident! In 1906 the New York World published "deadly parallel" columns showing eighteen passages from Jack London's short story "Love of Life" side by side with similar passages from a nonfiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald entitled "Lost in the Land of the Midnight Sun." According to London's daughter Joan, the parallels "[proved] beyond question that Jack had merely rewritten the Biddle account." (Jack London would surely have objected to that word "merely.") Responding, London noted the World did not accuse him of "plagiarism," but only of "identity of time and situation," to which he defiantly "pled guilty." London acknowledged his use of Biddle, cited several other sources he had used, and stated, "I, in the course of making my living by turning journalism into literature, used material from various sources which had been collected and narrated by men who made their living by turning the facts of life into journalism." The most serious incident involved Chapter 7 of The Iron Heel, entitled "The Bishop's Vision." This chapter was almost identical with an ironic essay Frank Harris had published in 1901, entitled "The Bishop of London and Public Morality." Harris was incensed and suggested that he should receive 1/60th of the royalties from The Iron Heel, the disputed material constituting about that fraction of the whole novel. Jack London insisted that he had clipped a reprint of the article which had appeared in an American newspaper, and believed it to be a genuine speech delivered by the genuine Bishop of London. Joan London characterized this defense as "lame indeed."

Beauty Ranch (1910-1917)

In 1910 Jack London purchased a 1,000 acre (4 km²) ranch in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California for $26,000. He wrote that "Next to my wife, the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me." He desperately wanted the ranch to become a successful business enterprise. Writing, always a commercial enterprise with London, now became even more a means to an end: "I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres [1 or 2 km²] to my magnificent estate." After 1910, his literary works were mostly potboilers, written out of the need to provide operating income for the ranch. Joan London writes "Few reviewers bothered any more to criticize his work seriously, for it was obvious that Jack was no longer exerting himself." Clarice Stasz writes that London "had taken fully to heart the vision, expressed in his agrarian fiction, of the land as the closest earthly version of Eden... he educated himself through study of agricultural manuals and scientific tomes. He conceived of a system of ranching that today would be praised for its ecological wisdom." He was proud of the first concrete silo in California, of a circular piggery he designed himself. He hoped to adapt the wisdom of Asian sustainable agriculture to the United States. The ranch was, by most measures, a colossal failure. Sympathetic observers such as Stasz treat his projects as potentially feasible, and ascribe their failure to bad luck or to being ahead of their time. Unsympathetic observers such as Kevin Starr suggest that he was a bad manager, distracted by other concerns and impaired by his alcoholism. Starr notes that London was absent from his ranch about six months a year between 1910 and 1916, and says "He liked the show of managerial power, but not grinding attention to detail.... London's workers laughed at his efforts to play big-time rancher [and considered] the operation a rich man's hobby." The ranch is now a National Historic Landmark.

Political views

Jack London became a socialist at the age of 20. Previously, he had possessed an optimism stemming from his health and strength, a rugged individualist who worked hard and saw the world as good. But as he details in his essay, "How I Became a Socialist", his socialist views began as his eyes were opened to the members of the bottom of the social pit. His optimism and individualism faded, and he vowed never to do more hard work than he had to. He writes that his individualism was hammered out of him, and he was reborn a socialist. London first joined the Socialist Labor Party in April, 1896. In 1901 he left the Socialist Labor Party and joined the new Socialist Party of America. In 1896 the San Francisco Chronicle published a story about the 20-year-old London who was out nightly in Oakland's City Hall Park, giving speeches on socialism to the crowds—an activity for which he was arrested in 1897. He ran unsuccessfully as the high-profile Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland in 1901 (receiving 245 votes) and 1905 (improving to 981 votes), toured the country lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published collections of essays on socialism (The War of the Classes, 1905; Revolution, and other Essays, 1910). He customarily closed his letters "Yours for the Revolution." A socialist viewpoint is evident throughout his writing, most notably in his novel The Iron Heel. No theorist or intellectual socialist, Jack London's socialism came from the heart and his life experience. In his Glen Ellen ranch years, London felt some ambivalence toward socialism. He was an extraordinary financial success as a writer, and wanted desperately to make a financial success of his Glen Ellen ranch. He complained about the "inefficient Italian workers" in his employ. In 1916 he resigned from the Glen Ellen chapter of the Socialist Party, but stated emphatically that he did so "because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle." In an unflattering portrait of Jack London's ranch days, Kevin Starr (1973) refers to this period as "post-socialist" and says that "...by 1911...London was more bored by the class struggle than he cared to admit." Starr maintains that London's socialism :always had a streak of elitism in it, and a good deal of pose. He liked to play working class intellectual when it suited his purpose. Invited to a prominent Piedmont house, he featured a flannel shirt, but, as someone there remarked, London's badge of solidarity with the working class "looked as if it had been specially laundered for the occasion." [Mark Twain said] "It would serve this man London right to have the working class get control of things. He would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties."

Alleged racialist views

Jack London's views regarding race are an extremely contentious subject which cannot be summed up neatly. Academics sometimes draw a distinction between the words "racialist," to mean a belief in intrinsic difference in the capabilities of different races, as opposed to "racist," implying prejudice or hatred. By this definition, Jack London can be said to have shared the racialism common in America in his times. Many of Jack London's short stories are notable for their empathetic portrayal of Hispanic (The Mexican), Asian (The Chinago,) and Hawai'ian (Koolau the Leper) characters. But, unlike, say, Mark Twain, Jack London did not depart from the racialist views that were the norm in American society in his time, and he shared the typical California concerns about Asian immigration and "the yellow peril" (which he actually used as the title of an essay he wrote in 1904[http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings/Revolution/yellow.html]). To illustrate the social context, note the sentiments of H. G. Wells, writing in 1901, in Anticipations:

And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.

Compare these with those expressed by the character Frona Welse in London's 1902 novel, Daughter of the Snows. (Scholar Andrew Furer says there is no doubt that Frona Welse is here acting as a mouthpiece for London).

We are a race of doers and fighters, of globe-encirclers and zone-conquerors.... While we are persistent and resistant, we are made so that we fit ourselves to the most diverse conditions. Will the Indian, the Negro, or the Mongol ever conquer the Teuton? Surely not! The Indian has persistence without variability; if he does not modify he dies, if he does try to modify he dies anyway. The Negro has adaptability, but he is servile and must be led. As for the Chinese, they are permanent. All that the other races are not, the Anglo-Saxon, or Teuton if you please, is. All that the other races have not, the Teuton has.

His 1904 essay, [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings/Revolution/yellow.html The Yellow Peril], is replete with the casual stereotyping that was common at the time: "The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency — of utter worthlessness. The Chinese is the perfect type of industry;" "The Chinese is no coward;" [The Japanese] "would not of himself constitute a Brown Peril.... The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man; but in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their management." He insists that:

Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea and land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have done, there is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a melancholy responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel, which is ours, indubitably ours...

Yet even within this essay Jack London's inconsistency on the issue makes itself clear. After insisting that "our own great race adventure" has an ethical dimension, he closes by saying

it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.

An avid boxer and amateur boxing fan, London was a sort of celebrity reporter on the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight, in which a black boxer vanquished James Jeffries, the "Great White Hope." Earlier, he had written:

[Former white champion] Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his Alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson's face...Jeff, it's up to you. The White Man must be rescued.

It is possible to cherry-pick statements by some of Jack London's fictional characters that would today be characterized as "racist" (the word did not exist in London's time). Such statements occur increasingly in the potboilers he wrote to finance his ranch in his declining years. The reader must decide whether or not London places any ironic distance between himself and these characters. The word nigger is used casually throughout the novels Adventure, Jerry of the Islands, and Michael, Brother of Jerry. The latter also features a comic Jewish character who is avaricious, stingy, and has a "greasy-seaming grossness of flesh." Those who defend Jack London against charges of racism like to cite the letter he wrote to the Japanese-American Commercial Weekly in 1913:

In reply to yours of August 16,1913. First of all, I should say by stopping the stupid newspaper from always fomenting race prejudice. This of course, being impossible, I would say, next, by educating the people of Japan so that they will be too intelligently tolerant to respond to any call to race prejudice. And, finally, by realizing, in industry and government, of socialism—which last word is merely a word that stands for the actual application of in the affairs of men of the theory of the Brotherhood of Man.

In the meantime the nations and races are only unruly boys who have not yet grown to the stature of men. So we must expect them to do unruly and boisterous things at times. And, just as boys grow up, so the races of mankind will grow up and laugh when they look back upon their childish quarrels.

Death

image:jacklondongrave.jpg
Grave of Jack and Charmian London

Jack London's death is controversial. Many older sources describe it as a suicide, and some still do (e.g., the Columbia Encyclopedia [http://www.bartleby.com/65/lo/London-J.html]). However, this appears to be at best a rumor, or speculation based on incidents in his fiction writings. His death certificate gives the cause as uremia, also known as uremic poisoning. He died November 22, 1916. It is known he was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed. The noted London scholar Dr. Clarice Stasz writes, "Following London's death, for a number of reasons a biographical myth developed in which he has been portrayed as an alcoholic womanizer who committed suicide. Recent scholarship based upon firsthand documents challenges this caricature."[http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/jackbio.html] Suicide does figure in London's writing. In his autobiographical novel Martin Eden, the protagonist commits suicide by drowning. In his autobiographical memoir John Barleycorn, he claims, as a youth, while under the influence of alcohol, "some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me," and he jumped into the Bay intending to drown himself and nearly succeeded. An even closer parallel occurs in the denouement of The Little Lady of the Big House, in which the heroine, confronted by the pain of a mortal and untreatable gunshot wound, undergoes a physician-assisted suicide by means of morphine. These accounts in his writings probably contributed to the "biographical myth." Jack London's ashes are buried, together with those of his wife Charmian, in Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California. The simple grave is marked only by a mossy boulder.

Works

Short stories

Western writer and historian Dale L. Walker writes[http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/part1.html]: :London's true métier was the short story....London's true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed. His stories that run longer than the magic 7,500 generally—but certainly not always—could have benefitted from self-editing. London's "strength of utterance" is at its height in his stories, and they are painstakingly well-constructed. (In contrast, many of his novels, including The Call of the Wild, are weakly constructed, episodic, and resemble linked sequences of short stories). "To Build a Fire" is the best known of all his stories, probably deservedly so. Other fine stories from his Klondike period include: "All Gold Canyon," about a battle between a gold prospector and a claim jumper; "The Law of Life," about an aging man abandoned by his tribe and left to die; and "Love of Life," about a desperate trek by a prospector across the Canadian taiga. "Moon Face" invites comparison with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Jack London was a boxing fan and an avid amateur boxer himself. "A Piece of Steak" is an evocative tale about a match between an older boxer and a younger one. "The Mexican" combines boxing with a social theme, as a young Mexican endures an unfair fight and ethnic prejudice in order to earn money with which to aid the Mexican revolution. A surprising number of Jack London's stories would today be classified as science fiction. "The Unparalleled Invasion" describes germ warfare against China. "Goliah" revolves around an irresistible energy weapon. "The Shadow and the Flash" is a highly original tale about two competitive brothers who take two different routes to achieving invisibility. "A Relic of the Pliocene" is a tall tale about an encounter of a modern-day man with a mammoth. "The Red One" tells of an island tribe held in thrall by an extraterrestrial object. (And his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, meets the contemporary definition of "Soft" science fiction).

Novels

Jack London's most famous work is The Call of the Wild. Critic Maxwell Geismar called it "a beautiful prose poem," editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn," and novelist E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece." Nevertheless, as Dale L. Walker[http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/part1.html] commented: :Jack London was an uncomfortable novelist, that form too long for his natural impatience and the quickness of his mind. His novels, even the best of them, are hugely flawed. It is often observed his novels are episodic and resemble a linked series of short stories. Walker writes: :The Star Rover, that magnificent experiment, is actually a series of short stories connected by a unifying device... Smoke Bellew is a series of stories bound together in a novel-like form by their reappearing protagonist, Kit Bellew; and John Barleycorn... is a synoptic series of short episodes. Even The Call of the Wild, which Walker calls a "long short story," is picaresque or episodic. In addition to The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden are widely admired. Ambrose Bierce called The Sea-Wolf "the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime." However, many agree with Bierce that "The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful." The Iron Heel is interesting as an example of a dystopian novel which anticipates and influenced George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jack London's socialist politics are explicitly on display here. Its description of the capitalist class forming an organised, totalitarian, violent oligarchy to crush the working-class forewarned in some detail the Fascist dictatorships of Europe. Given it was written in 1908, this prediction was somewhat uncanny, as Trotsky noted while commenting on the book in the 30s. Martin Eden is a novel about a struggling young writer with a very strong resemblance to Jack London.

Nonfiction and autobiographical memoirs

He was commissioned to write The People of the Abyss (1903), an investigation into the slum conditions in which the poor lived in the capital of the British empire. London did not write favorably about London. The Road (1907) is a series of tales and reminiscences of Jack London's hobo days. It relates the tricks that hoboes used to evade train crews, and reminisces about his travels with Kelly's Army. He credits his story-telling skill to the hobo's necessity of concocting tales to coax meals from sympathetic strangers. Jack London's autobiographical book of "alcoholic memoirs," John Barleycorn, was published in 1913. Recommended by Alcoholics Anonymous, it depicts the outward and inward life of an alcoholic. The passages depicting his interior mental state, which he called the "White Logic," are among his strongest and most evocative writing. The question must, however, be raised: is it truly against alcohol, or a love hymn to alcohol? He makes alcohol sound exciting, dangerous, comradely, glamorous, manly. In the end, when he sums it up, this is the total he comes up with:

And so I pondered my problem. I should not care to revisit all these fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before. Glass in hand! There is a magic in the phrase. It means more than all the words in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.

No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion.

The Cruise of the Snark (1913) is a memoir of Jack and Charmian London's 1907-1909 voyage across the Pacific. His descriptions of "surf-riding," which he dubbed a "royal sport," helped introduce it to and popularize it with the mainland. London writes:

Through the white crest of a breaker suddenly appears a dark figure, erect, a man-fish or a sea-god, on the very forward face of the crest where the top falls over and down, driving in toward shore, buried to his loins in smoking spray, caught up by the sea and flung landward, bodily, a quarter of a mile. It is a Kanaka on a surf-board. And I know that when I have finished these lines I shall be out in that riot of colour and pounding surf, trying to bit those breakers even as he, and failing as he never failed, but living life as the best of us may live it.

Apocrypha

Jack London Credo

Jack London's literary executor, Irving Shepard, quoted a "Jack London Credo" in an introduction to a 1956 collection of Jack London stories: :I would rather be ashes than dust! :I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. :I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. :The function of man is to live, not to exist. :I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. :I shall use my time. [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/credo.html Clarice Stasz] notes that the passage "has many marks of London's style." Shepard did not cite a source. The words he quotes appeared in a story in the San Francisco Bulletin, December 2, 1916 by Journalist Ernest J. Hopkins, who visited the ranch just weeks before London's death. Stasz notes "Even moreso than today journalists' quotes were unreliable or even sheer inventions" and says no direct source in London's writings has been found. The phrase "I would rather be ashes than dust" appears in an inscription he wrote in an autograph book. In the short story “By The Turtles of Tasman,” a character, defending her ne’er-do-well grasshopperish father to her antlike uncle, says: “...my father has been a king. He has lived.... Have you lived merely to live? Are you afraid to die? I’d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet. When you are dust, my father will be ashes."

The Scab

A short diatribe on "The Scab" is often quoted within the labor movement and frequently attributed to Jack London. It opens:

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue....

This does not seem to appear in his published work. Although he did give a speech entitled [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings/WarOfTheClasses/scab.html "The Scab"] to the Oakland Socialist Party Local on April 5, 1903, this speech, published in The War of the Classes, contains nothing similar to the "rattlesnake, toad, and vampire" quotation and is completely different from it in content, style, and tone. Generally Jack London did not use demotic language in his writing except in dialogue spoken by his characters. One online source, no longer accessible, gave a chain of citations which credits the diatribe as having been published in The Bridgeman, official organ of the Structural Iron Workers, which in turned credited the Elevator Constructor, official journal of the International Union of Elevator Constructors, which credited the Oregon Labor Press as publishing it in 1926.

Might is Right

Anton LaVey's Church of Satan claims that "Ragnar Redbeard," pseudonymous author of the 1896 book Might is Right, was Jack London. No London biographers mention any such possibility.

B. Traven

During the 1930s, the enigmatic novelist B. Traven, best known in the U. S. as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was hailed as "the German Jack London." His politics, themes, writing style, and settings really do bear a recognizable resemblance to Jack London's. Traven kept his identity secret during his life. Almost every commentator on Traven mentions in passing a fanciful speculation Traven actually was Jack London, who presumably would have had to have faked his own death. It is not clear whether this suggestion was ever made seriously. No London biographer has even bothered to mention it. The identification of Traven with London is one of many such speculations—another unlikely one being Ambrose Bierce—which were laid to rest by a 1990 interview in which Traven's widow identified Traven as Ret Marut, a left-wing revolutionary in Germany during World War I.

References and other sources

Biographies and books about Jack London

- Jack London and His Times, Joan London, 1939 (Doubleday, Doran). By Jack London's daughter. Notable for its background on social and economic conditions in California during various periods in Jack London's life.
- A Pictorial Biography of Jack London, Russ Kingman, 1979; "Published for Jack London Research Center by David Rejl, California." Includes a wealth of thought-provoking photographs documenting seemingly every person and place in Jack London's life.
- Footloose in Arcadia: A Personal Record of Jack London, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, Joseph Noel, 1940, Carrick and Evans, New York.
- Jack London's Women, Clarice Stasz, 2001 (University of Massachusetts Press)
- Sailor on Horseback, Irving Stone, 1938. Dale L. Walker notes[http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/WolfDying/page_two.html]: "Sailor on Horseback was a massively flawed book.... The author depended too much on London's fiction... to recreate the author's life.... Stone the novelist could not escape novelizing Sailor on Horseback (later editions were more factually subtitled 'A Biographical Novel')."
- Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, Kevin Starr, 1973, Oxford University Press. 1986 reprint: ISBN 0195042336

References

- Letter to Japanese-American Commercial Weekly, August 25, 1913: from The Letters of Jack London: Volume Three: 1913-1916, edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III, and I. Milo Shepard, Stanford University Press 1988, p. 1219. ("the races of mankind will grow up and laugh [at] their childish quarrels...") Irving Stone

Novels

- A Daughter of the Snows (1902)
- Children of the Frost (1902)
- The Call of the Wild (1903)
- The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903) Published anonymously, co-authored by Jack London and Anna Strunsky.
- The Sea-Wolf (1904)
- The Game (1905)
- White Fang (1906)
- Before Adam (1907)
- The Iron Heel (1908)
- Martin Eden (1909)
- Burning Daylight (1910)
- Adventure (1911)
- Smoke Bellew (1912)
- The Scarlet Plague (1912)
- The Abysmal Brute (1913)
- The Valley of the Moon (1913)
- The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914)
- The Star Rover (1915) (published in England under the title "The Jacket")
- The Little Lady of the Big House (1916)
- The Turtles of Tasmin (1916)
- Jerry of the Islands (1917)
- Michael, Brother of Jerry (1917)
- Hearts of Three (1920) (novelization by Jack London of a movie script by Charles Goddard)
- The Assassination Bureau, Ltd (1963) (half-completed by Jack London; completed by Robert Fish)

Autobiographical memoirs

- The Road (1907)
- John Barleycorn (1913)

Nonfiction and essays

- The People of the Abyss (1903)
- Revolution, and other Essays (1910)
- How I became a socialist

Stories

- "Diable-A Dog"
- "An Odyssey of the North"
- "To the Man on Trail"
- "To Build a Fire"
- "The Law of Life"
- "Moon-Face"
- "The Leopard Man's Story" (1903)
- "Love of Life"
- "All Gold Canyon"
- "The Apostate"
- "To Build a Fire"
- "The Chinago"
- "A Piece of Steak"
- "Good-by, Jack"
- "Samuel"
- "Told in the Drooling Ward"
- "The Mexican"
- "The Red One"
- "The Madness of John Harned"
- "A Thousand Deaths"
- "The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone"
- "Even unto Death"
- "A Relic of the Pliocene"
- "The Shadow and the Flash"
- "The Enemy of All the World"
- "A Curious Fragment"
- "Goliah"
- "The Unparalled Invasion"
- "When the World was Young"
- "The Strength of the Strong"
- "War"
- "The Scarlet Plague"
- "The Red One"

Plays

- The Acorn Planter: a California Forest Play (1916)

External links

Works (available online)
- [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings Jack London's Writings]
-
- [http://www.amlit.com/callwild/chap0.html Call of the Wild] and [http://www.amlit.com/twentyss/chap6.html To Build a Fire] at [http://www.amlit.com/ American Literature] Sites about Jack London
- [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/ The Jack London Collection] Site featuring Information about Jack London's life and work, and a collection of his writings.
- [http://www.geocities.com/jacklondons/farmer.html Jack London's Ranch Album]
- [http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=478 Jack London State Historic Park]
- [http://www.huntington.org/LibraryDiv/JackLondon.html The Huntingon Library's Jack London Archive] Miscellaneous
- [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Images/search.cgi?Caption=Bohemian+Grove&type=and Jack London at the Bohemian Grove] From 1904 on, Jack London was a member of the Bohemian Grove, which at that time had a more literary emphasis than it does today. Charmian London wrote that "whenever feasible, our world-wanderings led us homeward in mid-summer, that he might spend at least one week of Hi-Jinks at the Bohemian Grove, situated but a few miles from the Ranch. He dreaded foregoing the marvellous annual Grove Play, words and music, acting and staging, all done by members of the Grove only." Other members of the Grove at that time included Ambrose Bierce, Gelett Burgess, John Muir, Frank Norris, and George Sterling. Refs: Charmian London (1921), The Book of Jack London, p. 19. Other members: Peter Booth Wiley (2000), National Trust Guide/San Francisco, Wiley, ISBN 0471191205 London, Jack London, Jack London, Jack London, Jack London, Jack Category:Klondike Gold Rush London, Jack ja:ジャック・ロンドン

1876

1876 is a leap year starting on Saturday.

Events

January-March

- January 31 United States orders all Native Americans to move into reservations.
- February 2 - The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs of Major League Baseball is formed.
- February 14 - Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone.
- February 22 - Johns Hopkins University founded in Baltimore, Maryland.
- March 7 - Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for an invention he calls the telephone (patent # 174,464).
- March 10 - Alexander Graham Bell makes the first successful telephone call by saying "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."

April-June

- April 16 - Bulgarian April uprising
- April 17 - Six Fenian prisoners escape from a penal colony in Fremantle, Australia with the aid of ship Catalpa.
- May 1 - Turks crush uprising of Bulgar Slavs
- May 11-May 12 - Berlin Memorandum - Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary propose an armistice between Turkey and its insurgents
- May 16 - British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli rejects Berlin Memorandum
- May 18 - Wyatt Earp starts work in Dodge City, Kansas, serving under Marshal Larry Deger
- May 30 - Abd-ul-Aziz, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire is deposed and succeeded by his nephew Murat V.
- June 4 - An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after having left New York City.
- June 17 - Indian Wars: Battle of the Rosebud - 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne led by Crazy Horse beat back General George Crook forces at Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory.
- June 25 - Indian Wars: Battle of the Little Bighorn. Lieutenant colonel George Armstrong Custer of the US 7th Cavalry Regiment leads a unit of 300 men in battle against the allied forces of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho, counting 5000 men under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The latter emerge victorious.

July-September

- July 1 - Serbia declares war on Turkey
- July 2 - Montenegro declares war on Turkey
- July 4 - United States Centennial See: [http://fax.libs.uga.edu/T825xB1xI5/ Centennial exposition described and illustrated], being a concise and graphic description of this grand enterprise commemorative of the first centennary of American independence. Publisher: Philadelphia, Hubbard bros, 1876.
- July 8 - Reichstadt Agreement between Russia and Austria-Hungary on partitioning the Balkan peninsula.
- August 1 - Colorado is admitted as the 38th U.S. state.
- August 8 - Thomas Edison receives a patent for his mimeograph.
- August 31 - Murat V, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire is deposed and succeeded by his brother Abdul Hamid II.
- September 5 - Gladstone publishes Bulgarian Horrors pamphlet
- September 7 - In Northfield, Minnesota, Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang attempt to rob the town's bank but are surrounded by an angry mob and are nearly wiped out.

October-December

- October 4 - Texas A&M University, the state’s first public institution of higher education, opened on October 4, 1876 as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.
- November 2 - Atlantic giant squid 6.1 meters long washes ashore in Thimble Tickle Bay in Canada
- November 21 - Porfirio Diaz arrives in Mexico City and takes power
- November 7 - U.S. presidential election is held. After long and heated disputes, Rutherford Birchard Hayes would be declared the winner over Samuel Jones Tilden.
- November 7 - Green Clay Smith ran as presidential candidate of Prohibition Party.
- November 7 - Samuel Fenton Cary ran as vice-presidential candidate of Greenback Party.
- November 23 - Corrupt Tammany Hall leader William Marcy Tweed (better known as Boss Tweed) is delivered to authorities in New York City after being captured in Spain.
- November 25 - Indian Wars: In retaliation for the dramatic American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, United States Army troops under General Ranald Mackenzie sack Chief Dull Knife's sleeping Cheyenne village at the headwaters of the Powder River (the soldiers destroyed all of the villager's winter food and clothing and then slashed their ponies' throats).
- November 29 - Porfirio Díaz becomes President of Mexico.
- December 5 - Fire in theater in Brooklyn, New York City, kills more than 300
- December 23 - Conference of Constantinople about Ottoman treatment of its ethnic minorities begins
- December 29 - The Ashtabula River Railroad bridge disaster, 64 injured, 92 dead at Ashtabula, Ohio.

Unknown dates

- Spandau Prison finished
- Paraguay makes peace with Argentina
- Invention of the four-stroke cycle internal combustion engine by Nikolaus Otto
- United States of America Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
- After the Young Turks rebellion deposes sultan Abd al-Aziz. He is succeeded by Murad V who, after being declared insane, gives way to Abd al-Hamid I.
- Samurai are banned from carrying swords in Japan.
- Harvard Lampoon founded.
- Heinz Ketchup introduced.

Births

January-March

- January 5 - Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of Germany (d. 1967)
- January 11 - Elmer Flick, baseball player (d. 1971)
- January 12 - Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Italian composer (d. 1948)
- January 12 - Jack London, American author (d. 1916)
- January 20 - Józef Hofmann, Polish pianist (d. 1967)
- January 23 - Otto Diels, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1954)
- January 29 - Havergal Brian, British composer (d. 1972)
- February 19 - Constantin Brancusi, Romanian sculptor (d. 1957)
- March 1 - Henri de Baillet-Latour, Belgian International Olympic Committee president (d. 1942)
- March 2 - Pope Pius XII, (d. 1958)
- March 4 - Léon-Paul Fargue, French poet (d. 1947)
- March 11 - Carl Ruggles, British composer (d. 1971)
- March 21 - John Tewksbury, American athlete (d. 1968)

April-September

- April 4 - Maurice de Vlaminck, lyricist (d. 1958)
- April 22 - Robert Bárány, Nobel Prize winner in medicine
- June 5 - Tony Jackson, jazz musician (d. 1920)
- July 12 - Max Jacob, French poet (d. 1944)
- July 19 - Joseph Fielding Smith, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (d. 1972)
- August 7 - Mata Hari, exotic dancer and spy
- September 6 - John James Richard Macleod, Scottish-born physician and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1935)
- September 15 - Bruno Walter, German conductor (d. 1962)
- September 16 - Marvin Hart, boxer (d. 1931)
- September 18 - James Scullin, ninth Prime Minister of Australia (d. 1953)
- September 26 - Edith Abbott, social worker, educator, and author (d. 1957)

October-December

- October 13 - Rube Waddell, Baseball Hall of Famer (d. 1914)
- November 7 - Charlie Townsend, English cricketer (d. 1958)
- November 7 - Culbert Olson, Governor of California (d. 1962)
- November 17 - August Sander, German photographer (d. 1964)
- November 23 - Manuel de Falla, Spanish composer (d. 1946)
- November 24 - Walter Burley Griffin, American architect (d. 1937)
- December 9 - Berton Churchill, Canadian actor (d. 1940)
- December 12 - Alvin Kraenzlein, American athlete (d. 1928)
- December 21 - Jack Lang, Australian politician (d. 1975)
- December 25 - Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan (d. 1948)
- December 25 - Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1959)
- December 29 - Pablo Casals, Catalan cellist (d. 1973)
- Alfred Stock, German chemist (d. 1946)

Deaths

- January 14 - Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, French painter, total gaylord (b. 1780)
- February 18 - Charlotte Cushman, American stage actress (b. 1816)
- May 26 - František Palacký, Czech historian and politician (b. 1798)
- June 21 - Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico (b. 1794)
- June 25 - George Armstrong Custer, U.S. officer (killed in battle) (b. 1839)
- August 2 - Wild Bill Hickok, American gunfighter and entertainer (b. 1837)
- October 1 - James Lick, American land baron (b. 1796)
- Abd al-Aziz, Ottoman Sultan (b. 1830) 1876 was also the year that football club Port Vale FC were formed Category:1876 ko:1876년 ms:1876 simple:1876 th:พ.ศ. 2419

1916

1916 (MCMXVI) is a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar)

Events

January-February

- January 1 -The first successful blood transfusion using blood that had been stored and cooled. Impressionist Monet paints 'Water Lilies'.
- January 5 - Heavy rain - allegedly caused by rainmaker Charles Hatfield - begins; it will cause flooding around San Diego, California
- January 8 - Allied forces withdraw from Gallipoli
- January 13/14 - A heavy storm sweeps through the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands, causing extensive damage. This storm helped the Dutch parliament to decide to build the Afsluitdijk and build polders in the current IJsselmeer.
- January 17 - The Professional Golfers Association (PGA) is formed
- January 18 - A 611 gram chondrite type meteorite struck a house near Baxter, Stone County, Missouri.
- January 23 to 24 In Browning, Montana, the temperature drops from +6.7°C to -48.8°C (44°F to -56°F) in one day, the greatest change ever on record for a 24-hour period.
- January 24 - In Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad the Supreme Court of the United States declares the federal income tax void
- January 28 - Louis D. Brandeis becomes the first Jew appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.
- January 29 - World War I: Paris is bombed by German zeppelins for the first time.
- February 2 - Blizzard in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
- February 3 - Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Canada are burned down.
- February 9 - 6.00 PM - Tristan Tzara "founds" Dadaism (according to Hans Arp
- February 11 - Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control.
- February 11 - Baltimore Symphony Orchestra presents its first concert
- February 21 - World War I: In France the Battle of Verdun begins.

March-June

- March 1 - Liberal British Columbia Premier Harlan Carey Brewster term in office ends
- March 6 - Sydney conservatorium of music in Australia accepts first students
- March 8-9 night - Mexican Revolution - Pancho Villa leads 1,500 Mexican raiders in an attack against Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17. Garrison of US 13th Cavalry Regiment fights back and drives them away.
- March 15 - President Woodrow Wilson sends 12,000 United States troops over the U.S.-Mexico border border to pursue Pancho Villa; 13th Cavalry regiment enters Mexican territory.
- March 16 - US 7th and 10th cavalry regiments under John J. Pershing crosses the border to join the hunt of Villa
- March 19 - First United States air combat mission in history as eight US planes take off in pursuit of Pancho Villa
- March 22 - Marriage of Edith Bratt and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. They would serve as the inspiration for the fictional characters Lúthien and Beren.
- April 24 - April 30 - Easter Rising in Ireland
- April 27 - Battle of Hulluch in World War One, 47th Brigade, 16th Irish Division decimated in one of the most heavily-concentrated gas attacks of the war
- May 5 - United States Marines invade the Dominican Republic.
- May 20 - The Saturday Evening Post publishes its first cover with a Norman Rockwell painting ("Boy with Baby Carriage").
- May 21 - Sir Ernest Shackleton and two of his companions reach a whaling station to get help for the rest of the crew of Endurance.
- May 21 - Britain initiates daylight saving time.
- May 31 - June 1 - Battle of Jutland
- June 5 - Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
- June 5 - HMS Hampshire sinks off the Orkneys, Scotland, with Lord Kitchener aboard
- June 15 - U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America. [http://www.scouting.org/factsheets/02-507.html]

July-August

- July 1 - November 18: More than 1 million soldiers die during The Battle of the Somme including 60,000 soldiers from the British Commonwealth on the first day. The United States is still unwilling to join in the war with Britain, Canada, Australia and the other commonwealth countries.
- July 1 through July 12, at least one shark mauled five swimmers along 80 miles of New Jersey coastline during the Jersey Shore Shark Attacks of 1916, resulting in four deaths and survival of one youth who required limb amputation. This event was the inspiration for author Peter Benchley, over half a century later, to write Jaws.
- July 15 - In Seattle, Washington, William Boeing incorporates Pacific Aero Products (later renamed Boeing).
- July 16 - Hellenic Holocaust: The entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the county of Kastanome is either exiled or killed.
- July 22 - In San Francisco, California, a bomb explodes on Market Street during a Preparedness Day parade killing 10 injuring 40. (Warren Billings and Tom Mooney are later wrongly convicted of it)
- July 29 - In Ontario, Canada, a lightning strike ignites a forest fire that destroys the towns of Cochrane and Matheson - 233 dead
- 2 August - World War I: Austrian sabotage causes the sinking of Italian battleship Leonardo da Vinci in Taranto.

October-December

Taranto.]]
- October 27 - Battle of Segale: Negus Mikael, marching on the Ethiopian capital in support of his son Emperor Iyasu, is defeated by Fitawrari Habte Giyorgis, securing the throne for Empress Zauditu.
- November 5 - Kingdom of Poland proclaimed by joined act of emperors of Germany and Austria
- November 7 - Woodrow Wilson defeats Charles E. Hughes in the U.S. presidential election.
- November 7 - Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the United States House of Representatives.
- November 13 - Prime Minister of Australia William Morris Hughes is expelled from the Labor Party over his support for conscription.
- November 18 - World War I: First Battle of the Somme ends - In France, British Expeditionary Force commander Douglas Haig calls off the battle which started on July 1, 1916.
- November 25 - Friedrich Adler shoots Karl Stürgh, prime minister of Austria
- November 30 - Hellenic Holocaust: According to the Austrian consul: "on 26 November Rafet Bey (Turkish Minister of the Interior) told me: "we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians … on 28 November.""
- December 12 - In the Dolomites, an avalanche buries 18,000 Austrian and Italian soldiers.
- December 30 - Humberto Gómez and his mercenaries seize Arauca in Colombia and declare Republic of Arauca. He proceeds to pillage the region before fleeing to Venezuela
- December 23 - World War I: Battle of Magdhaba - In the Sinai desert, Australian and New Zealand mounted troops capture the Turkish garrison.
- December 31 - The Hampton Terrace Hotel in North Augusta, South Carolina, one of the largest and most luxurious hotels in the nation at the time, burns to the ground.

Unknown dates

- Hipolito Irigoyen elected as the President of Argentina.
- Blaise Diagre, first black representative of Senegal in the French parliament
- Cours de linguistique générale by Ferdinand de Saussure is published.
- Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, are cancelled.
- Food is rationed in Germany.
- Ernst Rudin published his initial results on the genetics of schizophrenia.
- The Netherlands is hit by a North Sea storm that floods lowlands and kills 10.000 people.
- Woman's International Bowling Congress established in the US.
- Robert Baden-Powell founds Wolf Scouts in Britain, changed to Cub Scouts in the USA.
- Sopwith Camel aircraft is introduced to combat the German-built Fokker fighter aircraft.
- Louis Enricht claims he has a substitute for gasoline
- Gustav Holst composes The Planets, Opus 32
- Bray Studios created the Farmer Alfalfa series, the first of theTerrytoons.

Ongoing events

- World War I (1914-1918)
- Armenian Genocide (1915-1918)
- Mexican Revolution

Births

January-March

- January 3 - Betty Furness, American actress and consumer activist (d. 1994)
- January 7 - Paul Keres, Estonian chess player
- January 9 - Peter Twinn, English mathematician and World War II code-breaker (d. 2004)
- January 10 - Sune Bergström, Swedish biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2004)
- January 12 - Pieter Willem Botha, President of South Africa
- January 22 - Henri Dutilleux, French composer
- February 9 - Tex Hughson, baseball player (d. 1993)
- February 11 - Joseph Alioto, Mayor of San Francisco (d. 1998)
- February 14 - Masaki Kobayashi, Japanese film director
- February 26 - Jackie Gleason, American comedian (d. 1987)
- February 29 - Dinah Shore, American singer (d. 1994)
- March 3 - Paul Halmos, Hungarian-born mathematician
- March 4 - Hans Eysenck, German-born psychologist (d. 1997)
- March 11 - Harold Wilson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1995)
- March 13 - John Aspinwall Roosevelt, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1981)
- March 14 - Horton Foote, American writer
- March 15 - Harry James, American musician and band leader (d. 1983)
- March 17 - Ray Ellington, British singer (d. 1985)
- March 19 - Irving Wallace, American novelist (d. 1990)
- March 26 - Christian B. Anfinsen, American chemist, Christian B. Anfinsen laureate (d. 1995)
- March 29 - Eugene McCarthy, U.S. Senator from Minnesota (d. 2005)

April-June

- April 3 - Herb Caen, American journalist (d. 1997)
- April 5 - Gregory Peck, American actor (d. 2003)
- April 11 - Alberto Ginastera, Argentine composer (d. 1983)
- April 12 - Beverly Cleary, American author
- April 15 - Alfred S. Bloomingdale, American department store heir (d. 1982)
- April 22 - Yehudi Menuhin, American-born violinist (d. 1999)
- April 25 - R.J. Rushdoony, American founder of Christian Reconstructionism (d. 2001)
- April 28 - Ferruccio Lamborghini, Italian automobile manufacturer (d. 1993)
- April 30 - Claude Elwood Shannon, American information theorist (d. 2001)
- April 30 - Robert Shaw, American conductor (d. 1999)
- May 8 - João Havelange, Brazilian industrialist and football league president
- May 10 - Milton Babbitt, American composer
- May 11 - Camilo José Cela, Spanish writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2002)
- May 20 - Trebisonda Valla, Italian athlete
- May 21 - Tinus Osendarp, Dutch runner (d. 2002)
- May 21 - Harold Robbins, American novelist (d. 1997)
- May 26 - Henriette Roosenburg, Dutch journalist (d. 1972)
- June 4 - Robert F. Furchgott, American chemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- June 8 - Francis Crick, English molecular biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2004)
- June 15 - Herbert Simon, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2001)
- June 18 - Julio César Turbay Ayala, Colombian politician (d. 2005)
- June 23 - Hermann Gmeiner, Austrian educator (d. 1986)
- June 23 - Len Hutton, English cricketer (d. 1990)

July-December

- July 2 - Hans-Ulrich Rudel, German pilot (d. 1982)
- July 9 - Sir Edward Heath, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 2005)
- July 11 - Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 2002)
- July 11 - Gough Whitlam, twenty-first Prime Minister of Australia
- July 14 - Natalia Ginzburg, Italian author (d. 1991)
- July 18 - L. Patrick Gray III, director of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (d. 2005)
- July 22 - Marcel Cerdan, French boxer (d. 1949)
- July 31 - Bill Todman, American game show producer (d. 1979)
- August 25 - Frederick Chapman Robbins, American pediatrician and virologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2003)
- August 27 - Martha Raye, American actress (d. 1994)
- September 13 - Roald Dahl, Welsh author (d. 1990)
- October 3 - James Herriot, veterinarian and author (d. 1995)
- October 4 - Vitaly Ginzburg, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate
- October 19 - Jean Dausset, French immunologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- October 19 - Emil Gilels, Ukrainian pianist (d. 1994)
- October 26 - François Mitterrand, President of France (d. 1996)
- October 30 - Leon Day, baseball player (d. 1995)
- November 1 - John C. Harkness, American architect
- November 4 - Walter Cronkite, American television journalist
- November 5 - Jim Tabor, baseball player
- November 10 - Louis le Brocquy, Irish painter
- November 16 - Daws Butler, American voice actor
- November 24 - Forrest J. Ackerman, American writer
- November 27 - Chick Hearn, American basketball announcer (d. 2002)
- November 28 - Mary Lilian Baels, queen of Léopold III of the Belgians (d. 2002)
- November 29 - Fran Ryan, American actress (d. 2000)
- December 9 - Kirk Douglas, American actor
- December 11 - Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban musician (d. 1989)
- December 15 - Maurice Wilkins, New Zealand-born physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2004)
- December 19 - Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, German political scientist
- Jack Agazarian, English World War II spy (d. 1945)

Deaths

- February 6 - Rubén Darío, Nicaraguan writer (b. 1867)
- February 12 - Richard Dedekind, German mathematician (b. 1831)
- February 19 - Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist and philosopher (b. 1838)
- February 20 - Klas Pontus Arnoldson, Swedish writer and pacifist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1844)
- February 28 - Henry James, American writer (b. 1843)
- March 4 - Franz Marc, German artist (b. 1880)
- March 24 - Enrique Granados, Spanish composer (ship sinking) (b. 1867)
- April 19 - Ephraim Shay, American inventor (b. 1839)
- May 3 - Padraig Pearse, Irish nationalist (b. 1879)
- May 11 - Max Reger, German composer (b. 1873)
- May 13 - Sholom Aleichem, Ukrainian Yiddish writer (b. 1859)
- June 6 - Yuan Shikai, Chinese military official and politician (b. 1859)
- June 29 - Georges Lacombe, French artist (b. 1868)
- July 6 - Odilon Redon, French painter (b. 1840)
- July 16 - Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, Russian microbiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1845)
- July 23 - Sir William Ramsay, Scottish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1852)
- August 31 - Martha McClellan Brown, American temperance movement leader (b. 1838)
- September 4 - José Echegaray y Eizaguirre, Spanish writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1832)
- October 7 - James Whitcomb Riley, American poet (b. 1849)
- October 28 - Cleveland Abbe, American meteorologist (b. 1838)
- November 13 - Lanoe Hawker, British fighter pilot (b. 1890)
- November 14 - Saki, British writer (b. 1870)
- November 15 - Henryk Sienkiewicz, Polish writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1846)
- November 21 - Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (b. 1830)
- November 22 - Jack London, American author (b. 1876)
- November 24 - Hiram Stevens Maxim, American firearms inventor (b. 1840)
- December 28 - Eduard Strauss, Austrian composer (b. 1835)
- December 29 - Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic (b. 1870)

Nobel Prizes

- Physics - not awarded
- Chemistry - not awarded
- Medicine - not awarded
- Literature - Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam
- Peace - not awarded Category:1916 ko:1916년 ja:1916年 simple:1916 th:พ.ศ. 2459

United States

:For alternative meanings, see the disambiguation page for US, USA, United States, or American. The United States of America is a federal democratic republic situated primarily in central North America. It comprises 50 states and one federal district, and has several territories. It is also referred to, with varying formality, as the United States, the U.S.<