Something that you might not know about Jack London is that apart from being one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, he was also a photojournalist, socialist and more importantly a prolific photographer, capturing his surroundings on the various adventures and travels he embarked on throughout his life. There are roughly 12,000 photographs of his (archived in the Huntington Library in California) that bear witness to a particular proximity to the people and places that he encountered. When you look at some examples more closely, and specifically the photographs he took of people, you can tell that the camera angle is not positioned from above or far away (as an observer might look at the scene)....
The Call of the Wild doesn’t tell a pretty story, but a powerful one untouched by bookishness, and one that—immediately upon publication—secured London a place in the canon of American literature.
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In The Sun Also Rises alcohol figures into nearly every scene, underscoring how deeply intertwined these spirits were with Hemingway's own life and by consequence those of his roman-à-clef personas.
While derogatory language and ideas do not warrant censorship in the books we re-print, at Century Press, we do believe that they require examination and contextualization.
