By James Williams

| Chronological Listing | Source Abbreviations |

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The following chronological listing is an aid to further research in London studies. Used with other sources it becomes a powerful means to clarify the obscurities and confusions surrounding London's writing career. The rationale for including the following titles is two-fold. First, all novels and all stories listed in Russ Kingman, "A Collector's Guide to Jack London" have been included. I chose Kingman's list rather than Woodbridge's bibliography because the former is easier to use for this purpose and is as reliable as the latter. In addition, stories, sketches, and poems appear in the following list that were not published by London but are significant because they give us a fuller idea of the nature of London's work at a particular time. This is especially true for the first years of his writing.

A few explanations concerning the sources are necessary. I have been conservative in my approximations of dates that cannot be pinpointed exactly. If, for example, a story's date of composition cannot be verified, and no reliable circumstantial evidence exists, then I have simply given its date of publication. Publication dates are unreliable guides for composing dates and can be used only as the latest possible date that a given story could have been written. One may find out if the date given is a publication date simply by checking to see if the source is Woodbridge, the standard London bibliography.

If the source used is JL 933-935, then the date is most likely the earliest date London sent the manuscript to a publisher. In a few cases London actually wrote in these sales notebooks the date he finished the manuscript. I have not differentiated between the two kinds of dates for two reasons. I did not want to clutter the table with special signals to the reader. Also, it was London's habit to send a manuscript to a magazine a few days after he, and later wives Bess or Charmian London, had typed it. JL 308 is a handwritten list of manuscripts and their dates of completion. Charmian London, after her husband died, apparently requested that someone make such a list before she offered his manuscripts for sale. This list, however, is incomplete and therefore cannot be used for every entry in the following table. Although it lists nearly every story he wrote late in life, its earliest story is only "A Nose for the King," written in 1904. When JL 308 and JL 933-935 overlapped, it was a great satisfaction to me to discover that they were concurrent.

We will never be sure of the exact dates of all of these stories, and some still remain a matter of contention. Further, the dates I have used do not take into account when London actually began writing notes for a story in preparation for its composition, or when London revised the stories either in manuscript (for example, after he had received acceptance from a publisher with the proviso that he cut the story down) or in galleys and pages. I do not mean to suggest that London's process of composition began when he wrote the first word on the first piece of paper of the manuscript he eventually sent to a publisher. Nor did it end when he sent the story. Many of London's works have a complex compositional history, far too complex to be represented by a list such as this one. This list, however, does have the merit of showing when London was most fully engaged in writing down in consecutive sentences each of his works. Always a disciplined writer, London set aside time periods to write each story or essay once he felt he had a grasp of the whole of it, and this list marks those periods.

This list was researched, composed, and published in American Literary Realism (23,2, winter 1991: 64-86) before the publication of The Complete Short Stories of Jack London, which contains in an appendix a summary of London's magazine sales notebooks. There are a number of inaccuracies in that appendix that should be pointed out. For example, no date is given for the submission of "The Strange Experience of a Misogynist," but London's notebook lists "June 1897 " as the date he submitted it to Century. Also, the notebooks show that London submitted "The Plague Ship" on 11 June 1897, while the summary in The Complete Short Stories lists no date. Finally, the relevant entry in London's notebook for "A Thousand Deaths" is somewhat unclear. It reads as follows (London usually devoted a page to the name of a magazine—or syndicate or newspaper—and then listed below the periodical title the names of the stories he had sent and the date on which he had sent it; to get the earliest date for a London title, then, one has to search each page, looking for one title at a time):

Scribner's
Thousand Deaths June 27 1897
Misogynist Sept. 1898
Lover's Liturgy April 20/99
Two Children of Israel May 18/99
At the Rainbows End Oct 17/99
Siwash Jan 6 /99
Dignity of Dollars March 7/00
The Material Side May 21/00

The problem lies in the way London marked the year "1897." To me, it is apparent that he first wrote 1898 and then wrote a seven over the eight; however, it could also be a nine. I base my judgment on the chronological sequence of the list on this particular page and on the fact that the seven in "June 27" matches the seven in "1897."

When did London first begin his serious fiction writing? I think everyone agrees that although The Aegis stories from 1894–95 may be regarded as somewhat amateurish, nonetheless they do represent his first real attempt at writing fiction. But the editors of The Complete Short Stories believe that London's next creative outpouring was the fall of 1898, that is, when London returned from the Klondike. They ignore the spring and early summer of 1897, which was in fact a very productive period for London. We may never know the exact titles or the exact amount of work he produced then (in John Barleycorn he alludes to "various essays" and poetry and jokes), but this relatively brief time period must be regarded as a crucial stage in the development of the young writer. For it represents a time in which London chose to write without being directly influenced by larger historical events, such as the Klondike gold rush. Too often, critics either assert that London became a writer as a direct result of his experiences in the Klondike or that somehow world historical events such as the gold rush or the rise of socialism are responsible for London's creativity. Without denying the importance of viewing London as one among many cultural workers at the turn of the century in California and in the Pacific region in general—that is, without denying the importance of local and global cultural forces at work in the creation of any author—I nonetheless do not want to lose sight of the individual genius at work.

 

Chronological Listing

| 1893 | 1894 | 1895 | 1896 | 1897 | 1898 | 1899 | 1900 | 1901 | 1902 | 1903 | 1904 |
| 1905 | 1906 | 1907 | 1908 | 1909 | 1910 | 1911 | 1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 |
| Source Abbreviations |

1893

1894

1895

1896

1897

1898

1899

1900

1901

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912

1913

1914

1915

1916

Abbreviations for Sources and Bibliography