12 January: Jack London

American author Jack London was born on this date in 1876. He's famous for writing Call of the Wild and White Fang. Some things you might not know about him.

1. He was born in San Francisco and given the name John Griffith Chaney. His father wasn't in the picture, and when he was eight months old, his mother, Flora, married a civil war veteran named John London, who adopted him. Jack was a nickname he started using later in his childhood.
2. Flora was a psychic, who believed she could talk to dead people and predict the future. She came from a rich family, but left home when the family lost their money. She worked as a psychic and took up with William Chaney, an astrologer. Fatherhood wasn't part of William's life plan, and when Flora told him she was pregnant, he ordered her to have an abortion. Flora then tried to kill herself by overdosing on laudanum. When that failed, she tried to shoot herself in the head but the gun didn't work. William moved to Chicago, claiming he wasn't the father, as he was impotent.
3. When Jack was born, Flora was unwell, and didn't want to look after him, so he was taken in by a lady called Virginia Prentiss, a former slave. Although in time, Flora took him back, the two families were neighbours, so Virginia remained a significant figure in his life. When he was 15, it was Virginia who lent him the money to buy a boat so he could leave his job at a cannery and poach Oysters instead.
4. At 18, he joined a group called Kelly's Army, a group of unemployed men who were marching on Washinigton DC to protest about unemployment. He left them, however, and went to Niagara Falls, where he was arrested for vagrancy and put in prison for a month.
5. After that, he went to university but dropped out after a term because he'd run out of money. It was then he decided to follow the Gold rush and set out for Klondike. His novels, Call of the Wild and White Fang, were inspired by this experience but it was a hard life with not enough to eat. London suffered from malnourishment and scurvy and eventually was forced to go home. When he got home he learned that his step-father had died. Jack decided to write full time to support his mother.
6. While in the Klondike, he'd set himself the task of writing a thousand words every day, a discipline he kept up once he got home.
7. As well as his well-known novels, he wrote short stories including To Build a Fire and Love of Life. Not all his tales were set in the wild north. Some, like The Pearls of Parlay, were set in the South Pacific.
8. Later in his life he collected books - he had 15,000 books in his library and referred to them as "the tools of my trade".
9. He was married twice. His first wife was Bessie, who he wasn't in love with, but they were close friends and London thought that was enough to make a successful marriage and bring up a family. They had two daughters but they split up after three years and were subsequently divorced. He later married Charmian, who was, according to biographers, his soul mate.
10. He was an alcoholic, which took a toll on his health. His kidneys started failing and he was given morphine to control the pain. He died at the age of 40 from uremia and morphine poisoning. Some biographers believe the morphine poisoning wasn't accidental and he'd killed himself.

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During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

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