Jack London - The Sea-Wolf - 1979

Jack London – The Sea-Wolf – Easton Press – 1979

100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series

Jack London (1876–1916) was born in San Francisco as the illegitimate son of an itinerant astrologer and raised by his mother and stepfather in Oakland. He grew up working on the waterfront, raiding oyster beds, sailing on a sealing schooner to Japan, and tramping across North America before attending university briefly and turning to writing. By his early thirties he was the most widely read American author of his time. The sea, with its violence and its demands, runs through much of his best work, and The Sea-Wolf, first serialised in Century Magazine in 1903–04, draws directly on his experience of deep-water voyaging.

The novel opens when Humphrey Van Weyden, a genteel literary critic, is rescued from a shipwreck in San Francisco Bay by the sealing schooner Ghost. Its captain, Wolf Larsen, is a man of exceptional physical strength and autodidactic intelligence who holds a brutal, materialist philosophy and rules his crew through fear and force. Van Weyden, who has no practical skills and no experience of physical labour, is kept aboard as cabin boy and compelled to survive in conditions entirely foreign to his upbringing. The novel is partly an adventure story, partly a philosophical confrontation between two opposing views of human nature, and partly a study in how character is formed — or broken — under extreme pressure.

The illustrations in this edition are by Fletcher Martin, the American painter known for his vigorous figurative work and his ability to render movement and physical drama. They appear as full-page colour plates integrated with the text. The introduction is by Edmund Gilligan.

- Full genuine leather binding in steel blue
- Front cover with gold-stamped interlaced geometric and scrollwork design within a border frame
- Spine with raised bands, gold-stamped wave and scroll ornaments, and gold lettering
- Gilt page edges
- Silk ribbon marker
- Frontispiece portrait of Jack London, specially commissioned for this edition
- Printed and bound in the United States of America

Condition is fine.

Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.