Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney; 1876-1916) was a prolific American short-story writer, novelist, journalist, adventurer, and social activist, who pioneered accessible commercial fiction with two of his best-known works The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), which established him as one of the first highly successful American authors. Claiming neither to be a theorist nor an intellectual socialist, London's brand of socialism grew out of his life experience, beginning with his scrappy, working-class youth spent hopscotching through myriad jobs in San Francisco and Oakland, to sailing the high seas, joining the Alaskan Gold Rush, and tramping across the United States - all before the age of 20. War of the Classes, the first of two essay collections espousing his views on socialism, presents the origins of his hard-won socialist philosophy and, when viewed through the lens of today, eerily prophesies the burning fuse of capitalism advancing toward the powder keg our current international social strata.