The Sea-Wolf and Selected Stories

Impressed into service aboard the seal-hunting Ghost, Humphrey Van Weyden becomes an unwilling participant in a tense shipboard drama. With a wary eye, he watches the vessel’s abusive captain, Wolf Larsen, an enigma who can abandon two sailors on the open water, then return to reading the moral philosophers. One of the best sea novels ever written, The Sea-Wolf tells of mutiny, shipwreck, and a desperate confrontation.…
 
Also in this volume, “The Law of Life,” “The One Thousand Dozen,” “All Gold Canyon,” and “Moon-Face” offer more riveting action and adventure. In these tales, London’s descriptions of the natives, the northern dogs, and even the tundra capture the essence of the exuberant life he experienced firsthand.“He was a writer who excelled in describing cruelty, whose main theme indeed was the cruelty of Nature, or at any rate of contemporary life.…Life is a savage struggle, and victory has nothing to do with justice.”—George OrwellJack London (1876–1916) spent his youth on the waters of the San Francisco Bay. In 1897, when gold was discovered in the Klondike, he obtained a grubstake and spent a freezing, fruitless winter in the Far North; by spring he was ready to return home to write. In 1900, his collection of short stories Son of the Wolf was published. Two more volumes of Yukon short stories, a juvenile novel, and a Klondike novel followed in rapid succession. Then came his bestselling novel The Call of the Wild (1903) and the beginning of the years that were to bring him wealth and worldwide popularity. The eternal traveler, London served as a correspondent in Japan and Mexico and sailed his own ketch to the Solomon Islands before his death.

Ben Bova is the award-winning author of more than one hundred twenty novels and nonfiction books. He is a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, president emeritus of the National Space Society, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among his many honors are the Robert A. Heinelin Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.