Many callings of Jack London

GLEN ELLEN, Calif. — You’ve heard of Jack London, celebrated author of “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang.” You may also know him as an intrepid world traveler and socialist crusader.

But chances are you don’t know Jack London the sustainable farmer who pioneered environmentally friendly practices on his sprawling ranch in the Northern California wine country.

London, it turns out, was about more than dogs, danger and derring-do, a story state parks officials hope to tell as they meticulously restore the Sonoma County cottage where he spent the last years of an action-packed life.

“This is where he lived, where he wrote, where he died,” regional parks superintendent John Crossman says of the cottage, which is expected to be completed by late summer

“That house,” says London scholar Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “has so much history to it.”

Still, 90 years after his death, London remains a complicated character.

He was a socialist who worked hard at making money, becoming one of the highest-paid writers of his day; an author who broke ground by having nonwhites as protagonists in some books and yet made troubling ethnic references — consistent with the racism prevalent in his day — in others.

He was an adventurer who braved the Klondike, a bookish type who took along Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

And although he was famous for the canine-centric “Call” and “Fang,” his subjects ran the gamut from love stories to political dystopias (evil societies that are the opposite of utopias) to the supernatural. Astral projection is the subject of “The Star Rover,” a hallucinatory tour-de-force that, among other things, attacked inhumane conditions in the California prison system.

“Most people just think he wrote the dog books and he wrote books for boys. Actually, he’s one of California’s most distinctive writers,” says Miss Reesman, a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio and executive coordinator of the Jack London Society.

The early details of London’s life are a bit murky. He was born in 1876 in San Francisco, but it’s not entirely clear who his father was.

He tried his hand at a variety of livelihoods, from poaching oysters to being a hobo to hard labor. He dropped out of high school but later went back and finished when he was 21, attended the University of California, Berkeley, briefly, and ran twice, unsuccessfully, for mayor of Oakland as a socialist.

He died young, at 40, something that’s easy to forget when you consider his body of work, which includes scores of novels, short stories and essays, all fueled by a diligent 1,000-words-a-day habit.

Scholars differ on the merit of his works, with many preferring his short stories, such as “To Build a Fire,” a visceral parable of a rather reckless man versus nature. Nature wins.

London’s pastoral period started around 1905 when, already a successful writer and celebrity, he moved to Glen Ellen, about 65 miles north of San Francisco, eventually buying 1,400 acres that became his Beauty Ranch.

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