The Call of Jack London: Earle Labor on Jack London Studies

I first met Earle Labor in 1976 when I was in my junior year at Centenary College of Louisiana. I had heard about him as the leading scholar in the English Department, but I had not yet had a class with him because he was on a Fulbright year in Denmark. Upon his return I signed up for his Science Fiction class. I found him to be a dynamic teacher who made the class both intellectually exciting and fun. In my senior year, I took Labor’s capstone course on Literary Criticism. Once again, I found the experience uniquely stimulating. I noticed that he kept a little black book in his pocket, which he would produce when a student said something he felt was of note; he would stop and write it down, which was very flattering to undergraduate students. In the Literary Criticism course, Labor introduced me to Jack London, which I knew was his specialty. In that class, I read my first London story, “The Red One.” The story was out of print, so Labor had a department secretary type it up and mimeograph it for us. I well remember staying up late at night reading and rereading it, making all kinds of notes in the margins. I still have that copy. Those evenings led to more Jack London reading and to my first published article, on using the ideas of Carl Jung to read “The Red One” (“‘Falling Stars’: Myth in “The Red One’”). In my academic career, I have made my specialty Jack London and published a number of books and articles, including my recent Jack London’s Racial Lives (2009). Over the years, Labor and I have remained close friends and collaborators, as in our Twayne volume from 1994, Jack London: Revised Edition, and our work with three other authors on A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, now in its sixth edition from Oxford University Press (2011). Labor helped me found the Jack London Society, now twenty years old, and for which I serve as executive coordinator. He has influenced me as a mentor, friend, and colleague. Based on my interview with Labor for this special issue of Studies in American Naturalism, including the use of some of his quotations from the manuscript of his forthcoming definitive biography, Jack London: An American Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), I will attempt to convey the enormous presence he has in American literature: indeed, everyone agrees that he is the leading Jack London scholar in the world. Our interview covered Labor’s evolving interest in London, dating back to grammar school; his knowledge of archives; major milestones in scholarship; how scholarship on London has evolved; and future directions in scholarship.¹

Jack London’s Stories for Boys—and for Men

I asked Labor, who has just retired from Centenary College of Louisiana after a 60-year teaching and scholarly career, to tell me how he discovered Jack London and why he chose to devote his career to London. Over the course of a long and fascinating conversation, I learned not only about his accomplishments in Jack London scholarship, but also about the personal nature of his “call” to Jack London. I asked Labor to read to me from the Preface of his forthcoming and long-awaited biography, Jack London: An American Life, in which he describes his first exposure to Jack London as an eighth grader in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma:

Near the top shelf of our class library I spotted a thick book with worn-maroon spine bearing in faded gilt a title that caught my attention: Jack London’s Stories for Boys. Curious, I pulled it down, opened it to the title page and saw the Frontispiece: an Eskimo holding a slender little spear evidently starting to run from a very large polar bear and below the picture, “Then did the bear grow angry, and rise up on his hind legs, and growl.” Immediately fascinated, I checked the Table of Contents: “The Story of Keesh” (this was the one with the angry polar bear), “To Build a Fire,” “Lost Face...