Friday 22 February 2013

Jack London The Sea Wolf


The Sea-Wolf is a 1904 psychological adventure novel by American novelist Jack London about a literary critic, survivor of an ocean collision, who comes under the dominance of Wolf Larsen, the powerful and amoral sea captain who rescues him. Its first printing of forty thousand copies were immediately sold out before publication on the strength of London's previous The Call of the Wild. Ambrose Bierce wrote, "The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime... The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful." Read more on Wikipedia

Lowry refers to The Sea Wolf in his novel Under The Volcano when Hugh muses in Chapter 6; "..and perhaps it was true too he had been reading too much Jack London even then, The Sea Wolf, and now in 1938 he had advanced to the virile Valley of the Moon (his favourite was The Jacket)...." (Pg. 161)

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