The West of the cowboys, as Theodore
Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties
and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and
on the screen.
Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his
West in Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers
liked to call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the
"Call of the Wild," "living life naked and tensely." In his talk
Jack London was simple and boyish, with plenty of humor over his
own literary and social foibles. His books are very uneven, but
he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. If the Bret Harte
theory of the West was that each man is at bottom, a
sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every
man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a
short-story writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate,
by itself, for a very long voyage over human life.
"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and
died in 1918, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack
London.
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