Wordsworth Classics: The Sea-wolf

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Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876. He is best known for his novels "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang," written either side of his writing "The Sea Wolf." Coming from a working class background and having served a prison sentence for vagrancy in his youth, London would go on to become an activist for social reform. He died in 1916, aged just 40.Bear Grylls went from Eton to the SAS before a near-fatal spinal injury ended his career in the military elite. His undeterred thirst for adventure led him to become the star of the TV show "Born Survivor," which has been seen by over a billion viewers worldwide.

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. 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 Danas Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Edgar Allan Poes The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Herman Melvilles 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.

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