Jack London · 1909 · exile

London's most autobiographical novel, and the one he said everybody misread. A sailor teaches himself to write in order to be worthy of a middle-class girl, succeeds beyond anything he imagined, and discovers that the success has made the world unbearable rather than the reverse.

1. 1
   Oakland

   A sailor of twenty comes ashore, is taken to dinner at the Morse house for rescuing their son in a brawl, and sees a way of living he did not know existed - and decides to become a writer to deserve their daughter.

2. 2
   San Francisco

   The free library across the bay, and two years of nineteen-hour days: grammar, philosophy, Spencer and Nietzsche taught to himself from the shelves, while the manuscripts go out and come back.

3. 3
   Shelly Hot Springs

   A hotel laundry where he works himself to a standstill ironing other people's shirts - the chapter London wrote from having done exactly that, and the one that finishes Martin's belief that work is ennobling.

4. 4
   Oakland

   Success arrives all at once and means nothing: the same stories rejected for years are suddenly wanted, and the people who called him a loafer want him at dinner - and Ruth comes back, and he cannot want her.

5. 5
   The Pacific

   He books passage for Tahiti on the Mariposa with money he cannot spend, meaning to go back to the islands - and finds the sailors will not have him and the first-class passengers bore him.

6. 6
   The Marquesas

   Somewhere in mid-ocean he goes out through a porthole and swims down until his will gives out - and London, who was doing much the same to himself, insisted afterwards that nobody had understood the book at all.