Jack London, Plagiarist
Jack London rose to fame turning his adventure-filled life into best-selling novels like Call of the Wild. When he ran out of inspiration from his own life, he bought plots from his contemporaries to use as source material. These he would extend and embellish, thereby avoiding any charge of plagiarism. But there was one work London published under his own name that was not his at all.[1]
To be fair, he did it for the noblest of reasons: Friendship.
Jack London’s improbable best friend early on in his career was poet George Sterling, the debonair, blue-blooded scion of Rhode Island’s founding family whose day job entailed managing a capitalization of five million dollars for the East Bay’s most prodigious land development company. In 1901 when they met, Sterling posed quite a contrast to the stocky, poverty-stricken London who was just then making an unsuccessful run for mayor of Oakland as the Socialist Party candidate. Yet Sterling was also a social chameleon who had become the central figure of San Francisco’s most renowned group of artists and writers, slumming nightly at Coppa’s Italian restaurant on Montgomery Street.
The pair quickly found common ground in poetry and drink and remained friends for life. Seven years his senior, George felt to Jack like the older brother he never had. George, the oldest of eight siblings, could ably play the role…
