Sea-Wolf

With an Introduction by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading. 'The Sea-Wolf' belongs in the honorific tradition of American sea fiction where the voyage motif became a means of exploring the meaning of life, as in Richard Henry Dana's 'Two Years before the Mast' (1840), Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' (1838), and Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' (1851). The dominant subject is an intellectual conflict between a ship-wrecked literary figure, Humphrey Van Weyden, and the brutal captain of a seal-hunting schooner, Wolf Larsen, who rescues Van Weyden and puts him to menial work on the schooner. The central chapters focus on the gory details of seal-hunting, and the final section shows how far Van Weyden has learned seamanship as he restores The Ghost to sailing health and returns to port with the only woman passenger, another shipwrecked figure, to plight their troth. AUTHORS: Jack London (1876-1916) is a good example of how the popularity of a writer can wax and wane over the years. In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, London's stories of his native America monopolised the market like few authors before or since, yet following his early death interest in his work dwindled. It was not until the 1960s that his work began to be re-evaluated, and he is now considered one of America's finest, and most widely translated, writers.