On this day in 1876 Jack London was born, and on this day in 1893, London's seventeenth birthday, he signed on for an eight-month stint as deck-hand aboard the "Sophie Sutherland," a San Francisco sealer heading for the China Seas. The sealing voyage gave London his first published story, and eventually his second best-seller -- The Sea Wolf, 1904 -- but it is the seventeen years, taken all in all, which stamped him. Even if half of what has been written about London's boyhoood is fiction -- most of that written by London himself, in the grip of the later fame and legend-making -- the earlier years would still make a remarkable first chapter in the story of a remarkable, improbable life ... FULL STORY »
