And in The Iron Heel (1908), an astonishing political fantasy judged by Leon Trotsky to be a work of genius, he imagined the rise of fascism in America.

In 1907 London sailed for the South Pacific. The Cruise of the “Snark” (1911) recounts the writer’s grueling two-year journey through the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia in search of untouched civilizations. Forced to abandon his travels in Australia owing to illness, he returned to California in shattered health. Yet London soon produced South Sea Tales (1911), The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii (1912), and A Son of the Sun (1912), works that attempt to reconcile his dream of an unfallen world with the harsh reality of twentieth-century materialism.

By 1913 London was the highest-paid writer in the world. In that year alone he published The Night-Born, a collection of stories; The Valley of the Moon, a novel of California ranch life; The Abysmal Brute, a fictional exposé of professional boxing; and John Barleycorn, a memoir about his struggles with alcoholism. In 1914 he traveled to Vera Cruz to cover the Mexican Revolution for Collier’s magazine. Jack London’s final years were spent at his ranch in the Sonoma Valley, where he died of uremic poisoning on November 22, 1916. His last works of fiction include The Mutiny of the “Elsinore” (1914), The Strength of the Strong (1914), The Scarlet Plague (1915), The Star Rover (1915), The Little Lady of the Big House (1916), The Turtles of Tasman (1916), The Red One (1918), and Island Tales (1920).

“Jack London was an instinctive artist of a high order,” said H. L. Mencken. “There was in him a vast delicacy of perception, a high feeling, a sensitiveness to beauty. And there was in him, too, under all his blatancies, a poignant sense of the infinite romance and mystery of human life.” James Dickey wrote: “The key to London’s effectiveness is to be found in his complete absorption in the world he evokes. The author is in and committed to his creations to a degree very nearly unparalleled in the composition of fiction.” As E. L. Doctorow remarked on the front page of The New York Times Book Review: “To this day Jack London is the most widely read American writer in the world.”

CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION by Tony Horwitz

EDITOR’S PREFACE

SOUTH SEA TALES

FROM HOUSE OF PRIDE AND OTHER TALES OF HAWAII

THE HOUSE OF PRIDE

KOOLAU THE LEPER

GOOD-BYE, JACK

FROM SOUTH SEA TALES

THE SEED OF MCCOY

THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI

THE HEATHEN

MAUKI

FROM A SON OF THE SUN

A SON OF THE SUN

THE DEVILS OF FUATINO

THE FEATHERS OF THE SUN

FROM ON THE MAKALOA MAT

ON THE MAKALOA MAT

THE TEARS OF AH KIM

THE BONES OF KAHEKILI

SHIN-BONES

WHEN ALICE TOLD HER SOUL

FROM THE RED ONE

THE RED ONE

HAWAII MAP

SOUTH SEAS MAP

NOTES

READING GROUP GUIDE

INTRODUCTION

Tony Horwitz

In Jack London’s fiction it’s always fifty below. Sled dogs huff clouds. Saliva freezes and crackles mid-spit. Man and beast toil across borderless snow. Simply recalling the titles that I read as a schoolboy—The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire”—sends a subzero blast through my window in Virginia and sets the wolves howling in my summery backyard.

It seems strange, then, to flip open South Sea Tales and find London writing about the sultry, Gauguin-hued Pacific. No one romanticizes the North Sea, except herring fishermen. But the South Seas! Swaying palms, sun-struck beaches, shimmying hips and shimmering moonlight. What in Buck’s name is Jack London doing in Tahiti?

Much the same thing he was doing in the Yukon, it turns out. In South Sea Tales, London comes in from the cold but not from his cherished themes: man (and woman) against the elements, man in extremis, man’s fragile hold on the planet. In “The House of Mapuhi,” twelve hundred souls hug an atoll that is one hundred yards wide and three feet above sea level. When a typhoon swamps the island and rips out trees that people have climbed for refuge, only the fittest and craftiest survive, including a grandmother who lashes coconuts together as a life raft. Think “Old Woman and the Sea.”

“The Seed of McCoy” pits sailors aboard a burning cargo vessel against the high winds, fierce currents, and deadly shoals of a place called the Dangerous Archipelago. London writes of the ship: “She was a shell, filled with a conflagration, and on the outside of the shell, clinging precariously, the little motes of men, by pull and haul, helped her in the battle.” A mysterious, mesmerizing Pitcairner named McCoy, the descendant of a Bounty mutineer, arrives in a canoe. The desperate skipper asks if McCoy can pilot the flaming ship to shore. “I am as much a pilot as anybody. We are all pilots here, Captain,” McCoy cryptically replies, before steering the vessel through the rest of this eerie, apocalyptic story.

But London’s South Sea Tales are much more than a tropical recasting of his earlier and better known Klondike Tales.