“Slice of Life” By Jack London

Background Information

• “Love of Life” is one of the most famous Northern short stories by Jack London. This popularity is surely justified. The secret to its appeal is in the emotional impact it produces, behind which is the author's skill, the peculiar literary talent of Jack London.

• Without any prologue and exposition the author brought the reader right into the middle of the events “in media res” (literary term meaning into the middle of things.

Sensory Detail!

• “They limped painfully down the bank, and once the foremost of the two men staggered among the rough-strewn rocks. They were tired and weak, and their faces had the drawn expression of patience which comes of hardship long endured.”

• The basis for the plot in “Love of Life” was found in the real-life events in Alaska encountered by London in a newspaper. One of them happened on the Cooperman River, where one of the gold hunters with a badly sprained ankle barely made it to a populated area.

• Another event took place at Nome. There in the land of tundra, a gold miner got lost and almost died.

The facts about food hoarding and mania about food that haunted a person who experienced extreme hunger London also found in a book by Lieutenant Greeley about his polar expedition.

True fact constituted the foundation of the story's plot. Added to them was the experience of the personal “walk of suffering,” London’s own impressions from his trip to the Yukon.

http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/Bykov/ihs_chapter7.html