Jack London

Born illegitimate in San Francisco and raised poor across Oakland, London worked as a cannery hand, an oyster pirate raiding the beds he'd later patrol, and a merchant sailor before joining the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, where he found almost no gold but a lifetime's worth of material.

The Call of the Wild, written in barely a month, made him famous and rich at twenty-seven: Buck, a stolen sled dog, sheds every trace of domestication until only a Darwinian wildness remains. White Fang mirrored the journey in reverse, and Martin Eden, his most personal book, turned the same rags-to-riches arc bitter: a self-made writer achieves everything and finds it worthless.

A committed socialist who ran for mayor of Oakland twice and lectured widely on class war, London wrote at a self-imposed quota of a thousand words a day to fund an increasingly reckless life of ranching, sailing, and heavy drinking. He died in 1916 at his California ranch, not yet forty-one, worn down by kidney disease and years of punishing excess.