London has been described as a real-life Hemingway, and there are numerous parallels between the two men, including their common preoccupation with the Great Outdoor Life, their love of sport and danger, their macho images, and their respective deaths. Hemingway is known to have shot himself, while London almost certainly overdosed while suffering from uraemia, dying in his early forties. Born illegimate on the waterfront in San Francisco, London bummed around in various professions before becoming a (very good) journalist and a prolific writer who earned a world reputation with The Call of the Wild in 1903. He was a sailor, a bum, a gold-prospector in the Klondike, a hunter, a publicist, and something of a womaniser - his marriage broke up after the birth of two daughters, one of whom died as recently as 1991, and he lived with another woman until his premature end. London seems to have compressed several lifetimes into one, and in spite of his extravert image, he was at heart an emotional existentialist who anticipated the Beat culture of the 1950s. This biography, while sometimes rather insensitive on literary values, conveys both the hectic tempo of the man's life and the ultramasculine mood of the times; however, it seems unduly coy about London's real achievement, which needs no apologies at all. He is one of the great American writers, a born storyteller whom the greater public has never abandoned, however much London's standing has fluctuated with critics and academics.