Jack London (1876-1916) was born in San Francisco to an unmarried mother and a father who denied his existence. He was raised in poverty in Oakland, California, and by the time he was a teenager had worked as a cannery laborer, an oyster pirate, a sailor, and a sealskin hunter in the Bering Sea. He educated himself in public libraries, was jailed for vagrancy, and joined the Socialist Labor Party at nineteen, convinced by direct experience, not theory, that the system was designed to grind men like him into nothing. He began writing seriously in his early twenties, driven partly by talent and partly by terror of returning to manual labor. The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 gave him his material. The Call of the Wild (1903) made him the most widely read author in America. The Sea-Wolf followed in 1904, White Fang in 1906, and The Iron Heel in 1908-a novel so far ahead of its moment that it would not find its true audience until Mussolini and Hitler had made its predictions undeniable.