Jack London
The Silhouette/February, 1917
I consider the great factors of my literary success to be:
Vast good luck. Good health; good brain; good mental and muscular correlation. Poverty. Reading Ouida’s ‘Signa’ when I was eight years of age. The influence of Herbert Spencer’s ‘Philosophy of Style.’ Because I got started twenty years before the fellows who are trying to start today.
Because, of all the foregoing, I have been real, and did not cheat reality any step of the way, even in so microscopically small, and cosmically ludicrous, a detail as the wearing of a starched collar when it would have hurt my neck had I worn it.
My health was good–in spite of every liberty I took with it–because I was born with a strong body, and lived an open-air life, rough, hard, exercising.
I came of old American stock, of English and Welsh descent, but living in America for long before the French and Indian wars. Such accounts for my decent brain. I might have been born twins, or an imbecile; I might have been addled in the bornin’.
Poverty made me hustle. My vast good luck prevented poverty from destroying me. Nearly all my oyster-pirate comrades are long since hanged, shot, drowned, killed by disease, or are spending their declining years in prison. Any one of all these things might have happened to me before I was seventeen–save for my vast good luck.
Read Ouida’s ‘Signa.’ I read it at the age of eight. The story begins: ‘It was only a little lad.’ The little lad was an Italian mountain peasant. He became an artist, with all Italy at his feet. When I read it, I was a little peasant on a poor California ranch. Reading the story, my narrow hill-horizon was pushed back, and all the world was made possible if I would dare it. I dared.
Read ‘Philosophy of Style.’ It taught me the subtle and manifold operations necessary to transmute thought, beauty, sensation and emotion into black symbols on white paper which symbols, through the reader’s eye, were taken into his brain, and by his brain transmuted into thoughts, beauty, sensations and emotions that fairly corresponded with mine. Among other things, this taught me to know the brain of my reader, in order to select the symbols that would compel his brain to realize my thought, or vision, or emotion. Also, I learned that the right symbols were the ones that would require the expenditure of the minimum of my reader’s brain energy, leaving the maximum of his brain energy to realize and enjoy the content of my mind, as conveyed to his mind.
A word as to the writer of today: for one clever writer twenty years ago, there are, today, five hundred clever writers. Today, excellent writing is swamped in a sea of excellent writing. Or so it seems to me.
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