Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    How I Became a Socialist
    How I Became a Socialist
    How I Became a Socialist
    Ebook51 pages59 minutes

    How I Became a Socialist

    By Jack London

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "How I Became a Socialist" is a 1903 essay by Jack London. John Griffith "Jack" London (1876 - 1916) was an American journalist, novelist, and social activist. He was amongst the first writers of fiction to receive international acclaim and earn a large fortune from their work. London was also a member of the radical literary group "The Crowd", as well as a vehement advocate of socialism. Other notable works by this author include: "White Fang" (1906), "Before Adam" (1907), and "The Iron Heel" (1908). This fascinating treatise explores the idea of socialism and the reasons for London's advocacy, making is a must-read for those with an interest in his his life and mind. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality addition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateJun 10, 2017
    ISBN9781473344150
    How I Became a Socialist
    Author

    Jack London

    Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876, and was a prolific and successful writer until his death in 1916. During his lifetime he wrote novels, short stories and essays, and is best known for ‘The Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’.

    Read more from Jack London

    Related to How I Became a Socialist

    Related ebooks

    Political Ideologies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Muscle Works in Moscow

      Jul 21, 2020

      How Muscle Works in Moscow
      4 min read

    • Article

      Biography & memoir

      Jun 29, 2022

      Biography & memoir
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Political Economy of Joseph Conrad

      Nov 1, 2020

      What can Joseph Conrad tell us about the political and economic arrangements that make for a flourishing society? I argue in this essay that Conrad presents the England of his time as embodying the institutional and cultural arrangements that make fo

      26 min read

    • Article

      Edward Wilson

      Dec 3, 2020

      Edward Wilson immigrated to the UK from America after serving in the Vietnam War. After his teaching career ended, he became the author of eight highly acclaimed books, including the Catesby spy thrillers as well as standalones. ‘Portrait of the Spy

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Man Who Invented Scotland?

      Aug 5, 2021

      The Man Who Invented Scotland?
      8 min read

    • Article

      Giving The Poor A Voice

      Nov 23, 2023

      Giving The Poor A Voice
      3 min read

    • Article

      Bumptious, Bitchy And Belligerent

      Aug 26, 2021

      WILL LOXLEY’S Writing in the Dark, an evocation of London literati in wartime, is a bombshell of a first book. Having steeped himself in the diaries, letters and memoirs of an oddly neglected era in English letters, the author has composed a series o

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Arif Anwar

      Dec 9, 2021

      I’m on track to have finished a book a week in 2021, which I’m happy with given that so much of my time is spoken for by family, work, and writing. I don’t like stuffing 100-plus books into a year like passengers in a rush hour subway car, leaving me

      13 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Feb 24, 2022

      I’m a fan of Jonathan Meades, but his piece on Welsh and Wales was a nasty mix of cliché, minority-bashing, cultural snobbery and factual inaccuracy. He knows neither the country nor anything of the past and present life of the Welsh language. He doe

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      Man of the World

      Sep 6, 2016

      Shakespeare may never have left England, but he became the most global writer who ever lived.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The ‘Female Byron’

      Mar 3, 2019

      The ‘Female Byron’
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Autopoietic World of Franz Kafka

      Nov 1, 2020

      This essay is about the implications of Franz Kafka’s work for those of us interested in classical liberalism in relation to politics, law, and economics; it is not an exercise in literary criticism in any conventional sense. The quest aims to unpick

      24 min read

    • Article

      How To Become A Cult Writer

      Apr 1, 2022

      How To Become A Cult Writer
      8 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Sacks, Zambreno, Lawlor, McEwan, and More

      Apr 23, 2019

      Out this week: new Ian McEwan, a fascinating study of the American heartland, and the final collection from the late, great Oliver Sacks. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Sacks, Zambreno, Lawlor, McEwan, and More appeared first on The Milli

      4 min read

    • Article

      Bloomsberries At War PAUL BAILEY Writing In The Dark: Bloomsbury, The Blitz, And Horizon Magazine

      Jul 28, 2021

      Bloomsbury £20 The subtitle of Will Loxley’s first book does not sound especially adventurous or challenging. Haven’t we, both readers and writers, been here before? It’s not entirely fanciful to imagine a bookshop that sells nothing but biographies,

      3 min read

    • Article

      My Favourite Overlooked Black Writer – By Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood And More

      Oct 19, 2021

      Think “classic literature” and plenty of white authors probably spring to mind: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Woolf, Fitzgerald. Harper Lee, who wrote about race, is a favourite of many – but Black authors themselves are vastly under-represent

      4 min read

    • Article

      'The New Negro' Explores Alain Locke Not Only As Writer But Also As A Thinker And A Fighter

      Feb 6, 2018

      Stewart's impressive new book confronts for the whole of its great length the “two-ness” described often by W. E. B. Du Bois in his masterpiece, "The Souls of Black Folk."

      3 min read

    • Article

      Why We Need A New Movement

      May 26, 2022

      WHEN THE SECRET Author first wandered impressionably along Grub Street, the world was full of literary groupings. He was too young to remember the Movement (early 1950s) or the Angry Young Men (later 1950s), and the Sixties Experimentalists (Ann Quin

      3 min read

    • Article

      A 350th-Anniversary ‘Paradise Lost’ Reading List

      Feb 6, 2018

      Before John Milton could be a visionary writer, first he had to be a visionary reader. All poetry is supported by the accumulated scaffolding of tradition and defines itself in part by subverting that tradition. Milton was simultaneously partisan for

      16 min read

    • Article

      Most Anticipated: The Great 2023A Book Preview

      Jan 9, 2023

      Welcome to our biannual Great Book Preview! We’ve assembled the best books of 2023A (that is, the first half of 2023), including new work from Nicole Chung, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Claire Dederer, Brian Dillon, Samantha Irby, Heidi Julavits, Catherine La

      29 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for How I Became a Socialist

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      How I Became a Socialist - Jack London

      INTRODUCTION

      Jack London and Nietzsche

      Jack London is best known for his animal stories, White Fang and The Call of the Wild, books which appealed to the Anglo-Saxon sentimentality about animals, as George Orwell put it. He is also known for his quite ferocious story, Love of Life, in an introduction to which Orwell made the foregoing comment. Love of Life was read to Lenin as he was dying, and appealed to him very strongly. It is the story of a wounded man painfully making his way across the Arctic to keep an appointment with a ship. He becomes aware that he is being stalked by a sick wolf, and that the wolf is waiting for him to become weak enough to pounce on. He adapts himself to the situation by stalking the wolf in turn. Man and wolf see each other as food. And it is the man who sinks his teeth in the wolf's throat.

      The unconditional will to live is basic to London's writings. It is what he expresses best. But his writings are, of course, not a simple expression of the will to live. They are literature about the will to live, they are the will to live reflecting on itself and forging out of itself marketable short stories and novels. It is therefore not at all paradoxical that Jack London should have committed suicide. It is one thing to survive an encounter with a wolf in the Arctic by drinking its blood. It is quite a different thing to survive in the cultural milieu of California as a successful writer on the primitive will to live.

      It is not suggested that London was in any sense a fraud, or that he was only acquainted as an observer with the basic subject of his writings. He was born illegitimate and poor, went to work in a factory at eleven, became a working sailor at sixteen, and made his way in a tough world by sheer strength and determination. He was in that respect quite unlike Nietzsche, who had weak nerves, an absurdly sensitive stomach, constant neurasthenia, and a most cultured biography.

      Jack London became a socialist in a fashion somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians as he puts it in one of the articles reprinted in this pamphlet. His best known socialist work is the novel about counter-revolution in an advanced capitalist society, The Iron Heel. This novel is in some respects an anticipation of fascism. It is a unique work in socialist literature. It was published in 1907 and took on a new lease of literary life after 1933.

      George Orwell's virtue was his ability to ask awkward questions, and his insistence on asking them. This wayward characteristic gave him a greater affinity with Jack London than any other recent writer has shown. Orwell commented on The Iron Heel:

      "the book is chiefly notable for maintaining that capitalist society would not perish of its 'contradictions', but that the possessing class would be able to form itself into a vast corporation and even evolve a sort of perverted Socialism, sacrificing many of its privileges in order to preserve its superior social status. The passages in which London analyses the mentality of the Oligarchs are of great interest:

      'They as a class believed that they alone maintained civilisation . . . Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged . . . I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole Oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realise it . . . The great driving force of the Oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right.'

      "From these and similar passages it can be seen that London's understanding of the nature of a ruling class – that is, the characteristics which a ruling class must have

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1