For more than 100 years, his short story, “To Build a Fire,” was required reading for nearly every school kid in the US, most likely to teach them the necessity of survival, though the tale might also have been read as a paean to dying. The fictional nameless protagonist perishes alone in the cold and the snow, unable to build a fire. He’s a failure, not a success story. Now, on the anniversary of his birth in San Francisco, 150 years ago, Jack London, like his fictional protagonist, might be called another dead white male consigned to the slagheap of largely forgotten American authors. Maybe that’s where he should have landed decades ago, though the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman called him “the only revolutionary writer in America.” What was she thinking and what did she mean by revolutionary?

It’s true that he belonged to the Socialist Party for 20 years and that he resigned, he explained in a letter, “because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle.” The US Socialist Party was against the US entering World War I. London was for it. An odd sort of socialist, he wanted to be rich, live in a mansion on an estate with servants and in the manner of the robber barons he claimed were his enemies. With a democratic socialist newly elected the mayor of New York, it might be worthwhile to reexamine the political career of the radical Jack London who ran for mayor of Oakland twice and lost twice. Unlike Zohran Mamdani, he didn’t have a grassroots organization and local organizers with him.

True, he embraced genuine issues; he lobbied for the eight-hour-day and the end of child labor in factories. Also, to his credit, he defended Charles Moyer, William “Big Bill” Haywood and George Pettibone, the three members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) on trial in Idaho and falsely charged with the murder of governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. That same year and in the wake of the abortive revolution in Russia, he gave rousing speeches from........

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