The Sea Wolf
About this audiobook
He is a man capable of abandoning two sailors in an open boat, yet he is an avid and thoughtful reader of the moral philosophers. He is Wolf Larsen: captain of the seal-hunting Ghost, the unforgettable protagonist of one of the world's great sea novels.
Tormented by his own convictions, Larsen is an enigma both fascinating and repellent to his reluctant crewman, Humphrey Van Weyden. Throughout their long and perilous voyage together, the captain's ruthless belief in the survival of the fittest is pitted against Van Weyden's "civilization"—a contest between two opposing views of life that demonstrates Jack London's gift for expressing complex ideas with exciting action.
Together with the other stories selected for this volume, The Sea Wolf is a superb example of the genius of a writer who was, in the words of Maxwell Geismar, "the poet of the savage Darwinian struggle."
About the author
Jack London (1876–1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. Before making a living at his writing, he spent time as an oyster pirate, a sailor, a cannery worker, a gold miner, and a journalist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction writing. He is best known for his novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike gold rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” and “Love of Life.” He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen.” He was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, including The Iron Heel, The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.
Brian Emerson is an actor and technical director with a long career in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore areas.
