Jack London was born in San Francisco [?] 1876. He grew [?] in a family that was always poor. [?] mother was often ill and his stepfather, John London, tried different jobs [?] without much success. Jack [?] school at thirteen to work in a cannery fourteen hours a day. With the help of the local librarian [?] began reading and discovered in books a world [?] helped him escape from his grim surroundings.

[?] fifteen Jack left home, he bought a boat and became an oyster pirate. Then he [?] work with the local fish patrol in San Francisco and travelled around North America as a tramp. [?] he was nineteen, he decided [?] go back to high school. Later, he was accepted at Berkeley, but dropped out after four months. [?] 1896 he joined the gold rush to the Klondyke [?] north-west Canada. He [?] find gold but he returned with a story in his head that became a huge best-seller – The Call of the Wild – and by the age of twenty-nine he was highly paid and widely read. He divorced his first [?] and the mother of his two daughters and married Charmian, who would be his companion for the rest of his life. He [?] all his money on his friends, on drink and on building himself a castle-like house that was destroyed by fire. Although he achieved success, [?] always felt he did not quite belong and in 1916, [?] the age of forty, he committed suicide.