In Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete
literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged
in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in
London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and
nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative
process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and
agents. In this first installment of a three-volume biography,
Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of
a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss.The Jack London who emerges
in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership
with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George
Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American
literary history. London pioneered many author models during the
heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these
popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the
representation of the seen and unseen. London created an
impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of
other American writers of the time.Author Under Sail is a literary
tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer,
creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light
on the maverick side of machine-age literature.