The Sea-Wolf

Reading time: about 7.5 h
Length: 105,828 words · 208 pages
Structure: 39 chapters · 1 front-matter section
Language: English
Era: Modern

Humphrey Van Weyden, a gentleman of letters who has never done a day’s physical work, is thrown into San Francisco Bay by a ferry collision and pulled out by the sealing schooner Ghost, whose captain will not put him ashore. Wolf Larsen is brutal, well-read and entirely consistent, and the voyage north becomes an argument — conducted with fists as much as words — about what a man is for.

Jack London published the novel in 1904, drawing on the seven months he had spent before the mast on a sealing schooner in the North Pacific at seventeen.

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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Jack London

1876–1916 · Modern

Jack London (1876–1916) was born in San Francisco and left school early to work — in a cannery, on an oyster pirate’s sloop, on a sealing schooner, as a tramp, and in the Klondike gold rush of 1897, which gave him the material for The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906) and many stories. A prolific and hugely popular writer, he also wrote The Sea-Wolf (1904), The Iron Heel (1908) and the autobiographical Martin Eden (1909). He died at forty on his ranch in California.

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