Jack London Autobiography

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Jack London Autobiography As Dr. Suess once said, "Only you can control your future." He was right. We are all born with a clean slate, a perfect start. As we grow, we become our own person, changing into the individuals which make-up our society. Most of us exist and pass on, and as years go by, we are slowly forgotten by those we left behind. Fortunately, among those forgotten, there are those who are remembered. People who changed the world, who impacted not only those around them, but those who they don't know. People like John Griffith Chaney. John Griffith Chaney (Jack, as he called himself as a boy) was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. Jack was the son of Flora Wellman, an unwed mother, and William Chaney, an attorney, journalist and pioneering leader in the new field of American astrology. Although Jack's father was never part of his life, he did find a male role model when his mother ended up marrying John London, a Civil War veteran. After marrying Flora, London moved her and Jack around the Bay Area before finally settling in Oakland. As time went by, Jack grew to like John London, eventually taking his sir name as his own. John Chaney then became the Jack London we all know and love today. As Jack grew up working-class, he became very familiar with several odd jobs as a teen. Riding trains, pirating oysters, shoveling coal, working on a sealing ship on the Pacific and even finding employment in a cannery. To Jack, all this hard labor was worth it, because in his free time he would camp out at libraries, reading novels and travel books. These library visits soon lead Jack to his life as a writer, which essentially began in 1893. That year he had endured a rough sealing voyage, in which a typhoon had almost taken out the whole crew. Seventeen year old Jack made it home and told his mother the tales of what had happened to him

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