Who Is Jack London?

Many writers during the naturalist period used a diverse set of styles. Jack London was a good example of an extremely numerically focused author that used short sentences to create a larger impact on the reader. London used many movements of literature in his writing, along with very meaningful themes. He had a symbolic and repetitive style that was present throughout all of his stories. Jack London was not always the rich and famous author pictured in many young students' minds. Born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco, London was introduced into a low class, fatherless family. In London's early years, the public library was his sanctuary, he spent free time reading and had a love for books and short stories.
Love of life is a short story about an unnamed gold miner who has been abandoned by his companion Bill after the man injures his ankle. The man becomes dead weight in Bills eyes, so he continued to walk away. The unnamed man drags himself through the wilderness with no weapons to protect himself from nature. After days resorting to eating baby chicks and animal bones, he discovers the bones of Bill, his former comrade, but decides not eat them, in order to keep what little humanity he had left. At the end of the story, the man finds a ship full of scientists, and they rescue him from the cold Canadian
His themes are tough to decipher until the end of one of his stories. One theme that is present in both Love of Life and To Build a Fire is that nature is indifferent to human suffering. This is best shown in To Build a Fire when the air is so incredibly freezing that he eventually dies from hypothermia, yet nature makes no effort to help him get to safety, nor does the temperature rise. A theme that is repeated in Love of Life is that humans cannot survive off of nature alone. Throughout the story, the man is slowly starving, this shows that the normal human cannot survive alone in the wilderness. Another theme present in To Build a Fire is that over-confidence can be detrimental to a humans fate. The man in this story is overly confident that he knows where he's going and that he is smarter than that loony old man who told him not to travel alone. This eventually leads to him dying alone in the wilderness with no one to save him, all because of his over-confidence. London is able to successfully ingrain deep messages and themes into his short