Jack London

Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney), an outstanding American writer best known as the author of adventure stories, novellas, and novels, was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco.

The writer’s mother, Flora Wellman, was a complex, contradictory personality with a difficult fate. Her family was well-off, and the girl received a good education: first she studied at home, and then graduated from a women’s college (a teachers’ seminary). She drew quite well and played the piano skillfully and with pleasure.

Unfortunately, at the age of 14 (according to other sources, sixteen), she contracted typhoid fever. The illness was severe and complicated. Her eyesight was badly damaged, her growth stopped, almost all her hair fell out, and her teeth were affected. Her character had been unstable and hot-tempered since early childhood; the illness completely ruined it. After a very serious quarrel with her parents, she packed her things and, at the age of 25, left her parental home forever.

Life was far from kind to her. She had to earn a living by giving music lessons and holding fashionable spiritualist séances, which were popular at the time. Through these séances she met Professor of Astrology William Chaney, who had several failed marriages behind him and had no intention of entering into another lawful marriage with Flora Wellman. The brief life together of William Chaney and Flora Wellman ended in a public scandal, followed by Flora’s unsuccessful attempt at suicide because the professor refused to acknowledge the unborn child as his own. The pregnant Flora Wellman escaped with a minor scratch, while the supposed father was forced to leave the city and spend many years trying to restore his reputation. The question of who was in fact Jack London’s father remains unanswered.

During the first eight months of his life, Jack London bore the name John Griffith Chaney (since his mother called herself Mrs. Chaney, although she was not legally married to the professor), and until almost the age of two he was in the care of his wet nurse, Virginia Prentiss, a former slave.

In that same year, 1876, Flora met John London, a Union participant in the Civil War, a widower with ten children, seven of whom were already living independently, and on September 7, 1876, she