37 What I Learned from The Sea Wolf
O
ne of the writers who deeply affected me growing up was Jack
London. He’s probably most famous for the book The Call of
the Wild. But he wrote over 50 books. Some of them nonfiction. A
few autobiographical. But by far most of them were great works of
fiction. One of my favorites is The Sea Wolf.
One thing I learned from Jack London is to never...
Before I explain what I learned, let me point out that Jack
London was a powerhouse writer. He wrote adventure tales
packed with energy, conflict, and character. Whether the lead
character was a person or an animal, you could always identify
with them.
In The Sea Wolf, the lead character is the captain, called the sea
wolf. He’s mad. He’s insane. And he’s driving our narrator and
everyone else batty as well.
But you get to know the captain through the book. You learn
he’s smart, well read, articulate, and a bit of a testosterone freak.
But what could you expect when he came from the mind of Jack
London, one of America’s most popular he-man authors of the
early part of the 1900s?
London himself was a sailor. He had spent time on the sea,