About the book: 2017 / You could say that Jack London (1876–1916) became a writer, overcoming family rock. Unrecognized by his father even before birth, as a teenager he was an “oyster pirate,” a tramp, a prisoner, a “socialist boy,” and participated in revolutionary marches along the roads of America. Later he sought his fortune in the gold-bearing Klondike, mastered writing, traveled through the States giving lectures on socialism... Jack London lived a truly superhuman life. Over the course of 16 years of literary activity, he wrote 50 books, became world famous - his novel “Martin Eden” alone forged the character of more than one generation of youth on both sides of the ocean. The three great illusions of the 20th century - marriage on a reasonable basis, socialism as universal equality and the theory of the superman - Jack London materialized on himself. “Reasonable marriage” took revenge on him by alienating his daughters, socialism by setting fire to his “bourgeois” “House of the Wolf”, and he himself parted with the third illusion. Andrey Tanaseichuk revises many existing, romantic ideas about Jack London, “worldliness” them - and in this the book is polemical, but it makes it possible to form a personal opinion about the great writer.