June 20, 1903: "The Call of the Wild" Is Published

June 20, 1903: The Call of the Wild is published. It is the magnum opus of Jack London. He wasn't America's 1st bohemian writer, but he was the 1st to make it as big as that novel made him.

John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco, to an unwed mother, Flora Wellman. His father, William Chaney didn't want the baby, and abandoned the mother. Mother and child moved around the San Francisco Bay Area, before settling in Oakland, where the mother married John London. The boy became known as Jack London to differentiate himself from his father.

By the time he was 18, he had been an oyster pirate on the Bay, a member of the California Fish Patrol, and had worked in a cannery, a jute mill, and a street railway's power plant. He joined Coxey's Army in the original march on Washington in 1894. That year, he was arrested for vagrancy in Buffalo, spending 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary, while, to put it politely, he faced all the difficulties of prison life.

Then he returned to Oakland, and graduated from high school.

In 1897, he went to Alaska as part of the Klondike Gold Rush, but got sick there, and went home without having made his fortune. Now a dedicated Socialist, he decided that writing was his chance to not just make money, but beat rich people at their own game.

His timing was good: He began his writing career just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public audience, and a strong market for short fiction. In early 1903, he sold The Call of the Wild to The Saturday Evening Post for $750 -- about $25,000 in 2022 money -- and the book rights to Macmillan, whose promotional campaign propelled it to swift success.

In the story, Buck is a St. Bernard-collie mix, stolen from California's Santa Clara Valley, who ends up as a sled dog in the Klondike. He goes through several owners, of varying degrees of treatment, until he ends up with experienced outdoorsman John Thornton, and they form a close bond.

One day, Buck hears "the call of the wild": A wolf's howl. He runs off to meet the nearby wolf pack, but he understands that he doesn't belong. When he gets back, he finds Thornton and his gold-panning team have been killed by Native Americans. Driven by grief, Buck hunts them down and kills them. His last contact with the human world gone, and having little choice if he wants to survive, he returns to the pack.

Around the time the novel made London a literary superstar, his 1st marriage, to Bessie Maddern, with whom he had daughters Joan and Becky, was breaking up. His 2nd marriage, to Charmian Kittredge, was happier, but produced no children.

He went into journalism, and his eyewitness accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake increased his fame. But this career revealed a more sinister side: When Jack Johnson became the 1st black Heavyweight Champion of the World, London was among the sportswriters demanding that a white man beat Johnson, and reclaim the title for the white race.

In 1910, he turned to his fellow Californian, James J. Jeffries, who had held the title for 5 years before retiring, undefeated, to a farm in 1904. In column after column, London wrote, "Jeff, it's up to you." Finally, Jeffries caved in, the fight with Johnson was set for Reno, Nevada on the 4th of July, and London covered it. Johnson won by a knockout in the 15th round, and, while his writeup was as racist as anybody else's, London admitted that Johnson was a better fighter than his hero, Jeffries.

Like so many creative artists before and sense, Jack London fell victim to substance abuse, both booze and morphine. Ultimately, it was long-term kidney failure that killed him on November 22, 1916. He was only 40 years old.

Jack London Square, on the Oakland waterfront at Broadway and Embarcadero, is named for him. So is Mount London, on the Alaska-British Columbia line, a tribute to his writing about the region.

He was played by Michael O'Shea in the 1943 film Jack London, Jeff East in the 1980 film Klondike Fever, Aaron Ashmore in a 2012 episode of Murdoch Mysteries, and Johnny Simmons in the 2014 miniseries Klondike.

"Time's Arrow," a 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, was partly set in 1893 San Francisco, and includes Michael Aaron as London, and Jerry Hardin as another iconic writer, Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain. But there is no record of London having been a bellhop at a San Francisco hotel at age 17, Sadly, there is also no record of him ever having met Twain, though it was certainly possible, and they definitely would have had much to talk about.. London was a close friend of writer Ambrose Bierce.

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June 20, 1903 was a Saturday. There were 4 games played in baseball that day:

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Beaneaters, 8-4 at the South End Grounds in Boston. The Beaneaters went through some name changes, before becoming the Boston Braves in 1972.

* The Boston Americans beat the Cleveland Naps, 5-4 in 10 innings at League Park in Cleveland. The Cleveland team was named for its manager and 2nd baseman, Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie. They became the Cleveland Indians in 1915, and the Cleveland Guardians in 2022. The Boston team became the Red Sox in 1908.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 4-1 at South Side Park in Chicago.

* And the St. Louis Browns beat the Washington Senators, 7-6 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.