The Tools of My Trade: The Annotated Books in Jack London's Library
By David M. Hamilton
326 pp., $40.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-931378-09-6
California novelist and short-story writer Jack London wrote more than fifty books during his forty-year lifetime, including the classic The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and Martin Eden. How did he come to write these books? What inspired him? Where did he get his plots, his themes, his motifs? Where did he find the material to develop his characters? In short, how did Jack London perform his writer's craft?
The answers to these questions can, in part, be found in The Tools of My Trade. In this well-researched study of London's library, David Hamilton examines some four hundred books that London annotated, read, reread, marked, and quoted. The bibliography provides the sources for London's The Call of the Wild, The Star-Rover, The Mutiny of the Elsinore, and The Scorn of Women, as well as the short-story classic "To Build a Fire." In an introductory essay of nearly fifty pages, Hamilton sketches London's lifetime reading habits, examines his literary apprenticeships, discusses the importance of the sea-going Snark library, and takes a look at London's daily routine.
The culmination of ten years of research, including a page-by-page search through London's 15,000-volume library (still intact after more than seventy years), The Tools of My Trade offers literary historians, creative writers, bibliographers, and anyone interested in the writings of one of America's most famous literary figures revealing information about Jack London and his writing and research methods.
David Hamilton is the former assistant curator of literary manuscripts, including the Jack London archive, at the Henry E. Huntington Library, and has written extensively on Jack London. He is now an independent publishing consultant and president of The Live Oak Press®, LLC publishing company.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments / xiii
Introduction / 1
Annotated Bibliography / 49
Notes / 301
Appendix / 305
Index / 311
List of Photographs
Jack London Atop Sonoma Mountain
Jack London
Reading in Oakland, ca. 1902
Jack London and George Wharton James
In Korea as a Newspaper Correspondent
A Lover of Horses, ca. 1905
Aboard the Roamer
Korean War Correspondent, 1904
Jack and Charmian London and the No. 7 Remington
Jack London
Learning to Navigate
Clara Charmian Kittredge London
Jack London and George Wharton James
At Robert Louis Stevenson's Grave
George Sterling, Edwin Markham, and Jack London at Bohemian Grove
Jack London, Rex Beach, and Eddie Smith, ca. 1914
Sailing on San Francisco Bay
