Alex Kershaw has been a feature writer for The Weekend Guardian and the Sunday Times, and a contributing editor at GQ. He has authored several books, including the New York Times-bestselling WWII histories The Bedford Boys and The Longest Winter, and the biographies Jack London: A Life and Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa.
"Kershaw brings to life this talented but self-destructive man." --The New York Times " . . . Kershaw incisively reveals how the Oakland native's stint as a child laborer, Barbary Coast oyster pirate, boxcar hobo, and Alaska gold rusher would, by his mid-20s, inspire his most popular fiction." --Entertainment Weekly "So incredible are some of London's escapades that only an equally talented biographer could capture the essence of the author's character. Alex Kershaw does just that in Jack London, a breathless new look at the rough-and-tumble writer, warts and all." --New York Post "Kershaw's portrait is swift and sympathetic, and it makes you want to go back and read London's work again. You can't ask more of literary biography." --Men's Journal "Kershaw tells the human--or, for London, 'superhuman'--story well. . . . the lively story of a vitalistic life should help us look at him again." --The Times of London
Kershaw, a Los Angeles-based English journalist, writes that by the time London was 39, in early 1915, "the muses had indeed deserted Jack." Actually, London seems to have deserted his muses, producing what many considered alcohol-inspired claptrap about violent men and their women intended for quick sale. Even under the influence of John Barleycorn, he usually managed his thousand words a day, writing hundreds of fact pieces, short stories and 20 novels. A few‘Call of the Wild, Sea Wolf and Martin Eden‘were memorable enough to turn the one-time sailor and laborer into a literary celebrity. Ultimately, he was reduced to purchasing plots to exploit from an aspiring young writer named Sinclair Lewis. London has inspired numerous biographies, though with this work, Kershaw adds little to London's life but clichés ("Jack had... fallen from dizzying heights to rock bottom"). Although writing for an American audience, he uses British spellings ("tyres," "cheque") and lapses into language that would have embarrassed his mostly self-taught subject ("a boy who weighed less than him"; "intellectual ideas"). London, who died at 40, very likely of self-administered morphine while in the agonies of terminal uremia, suffers again in this latest life. Photos. (Jan.)
"Kershaw brings to life this talented but self-destructive man." --The New York Times " . . . Kershaw incisively reveals how the Oakland native's stint as a child laborer, Barbary Coast oyster pirate, boxcar hobo, and Alaska gold rusher would, by his mid-20s, inspire his most popular fiction." --Entertainment Weekly "So incredible are some of London's escapades that only an equally talented biographer could capture the essence of the author's character. Alex Kershaw does just that in Jack London, a breathless new look at the rough-and-tumble writer, warts and all." --New York Post "Kershaw's portrait is swift and sympathetic, and it makes you want to go back and read London's work again. You can't ask more of literary biography." --Men's Journal "Kershaw tells the human--or, for London, 'superhuman'--story well. . . . the lively story of a vitalistic life should help us look at him again." --The Times of London
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