Jack London's literary executors kept a tight grip, a very tight grip indeed, on his personal papers and literary remains. They pursued this policy of secrecy with the conviction that there must be, hidden away, a skeleton in the London closet. Mr. Stone was the first individual who had free access to all of London's papers and in this book he reports that the closet held not one but three skeletons.

Of the first skeleton, Mr. Stone writes that Jack London, born in San Francisco in 1876, was an illegitimate child, son of William H. Chaney and Flora Weilman, and that Chaney deserted the expectant mother, who married John London, a farmer and Civil War veteran, some months after the birth of her baby. The knowledge that he was illegitimate was always very disturbing to London, Mr. Stone adds, and he did his best to prevent the information from becoming public. Mr. Stone gives a lively account of London's marriages for the next skeleton in the closet. When Jack London died, in November 1916, at Glen Ellen, the world was informed that the cause was uremic poisoning. Mr. Stone gives his story of the circumstance, the third skeleton in the closet.

These are the principal revelations that Mr. Stone offers in his biographical novel, which follows London's career from its beginning in Oakland, where he grew up as an underprivileged youngster, through hardships of one sort or another and many adventurous experiences in Alaska, the Far East, the South Pacific and the slums of Whitechapel to his eventual immense success as a writer, who earned big money with a prolific pen. He traces London's struggle to obtain an education, showing how he contrived to equip himself intellectually for a career of literary triumph, which, from the first, he felt sure would one day be his. Of formal training he had very little, at any time, and did very well without it. If ever an American writer was the product of the public library system, and his own indomitable will to learn, that writer was Jack London.