Jack London's biography has long exerted such fascination that it has overshadowed serious appreciation of his work and personal achievements. It is not difficult to understand why. By any measure his life was remarkable: a classic rags-to-riches saga of obscure working-class origins, socialist agitation, becoming an oyster pirate in San Francisco bay, a Klondike gold prospector, a hobo, a hugely successful self-taught writer, war correspondent, adventurer, scientific rancher, playboy, drunk, controversialist. Indeed, the biography itself has acquired many tropes of its own in the hands of a number of writers, not least London's turn-of the century contradictory positions on race and the sense that he sold out politically as his wealth and prestige increased alongside the diminishment of his literary gifts into hack writing. Indeed, growing up in the nineteenth century but coming to prominence in the early twentieth, London's life has been taken by many to broadly characterize the United States's transition from a country dominated by its “myth of the West” into a modern industrial world power.

While part of this London biographic tradition, Cecelia Tichi's approach is to consider London as one of the period's most popular authors actively engaged with a number of the most controversial issues of his time. This was a period characterized by mass labour agitation, muckraking, the legacy of the robber barons giving way to modern corporations, industrial-scale war, extraterritorial expansion and imperialism following the Spanish–American War of 1898, debates over conservation and sustainable agriculture, and prison reform. To Tichi's mind, London is a public intellectual actively aware of his popular reach and committed to bringing his readership to the great issues of his day. It is a compelling approach that results in several interesting parallels with other public figures with whom London was connected, who ranged on the other sides of these debates. Two of these particularly stand out in Tichi's analysis: Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a public-relations founding figure whose clients included numerous industrial corporations, and Lorrin Andrews Thurston, a newspaper publisher and a leader of the US annexation of the Hawaiian islands.

Lee is the most enigmatic here and will most likely be least known to London scholars. Yet as a pioneer of what would become one of the twentieth-century's particularly innovative professions, his role in countering the rising fear and loathing of the huge corporations coming to irresistibly dominate the country's industrial and commercial landscape would be profoundly influential. Indeed, one can discern a key moment in the early twentieth century in which the agitation for workers' rights and public safety vied with US commercial imperatives. The rise of a mass socialist movement in the US was not to transpire, not least through the aim of the new profession pioneered by Lee to persuade the public to perceive the corporations differently. If Lee's work was to “mould” public opinion, it was London's as a writer and public figure in his own right to raise awareness of abuses and injustices. Of course, the period is the age of the muckrakers and London was the contemporary of writers such as fellow Californian Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair, who strove to uncover what they saw as the monsters of capitalism. London's common ground with Lee is in how he instinctively manipulated his own public persona and celebrity in a manner that was not dissimilar to the tools of Lee's trade. Well aware that a blatant assault on truths that his middle-class readership would prefer to gloss over would not secure him a readership, London resorted to allegory. Tichi reads the career of Buck the canine hero of The Call of the Wild (1903) – as a representation of the working class under capitalism ultimately achieving freedom – particularly convincingly.

Tichi also discusses Thurston's courting and attempt to manipulate London's celebrity with the ultimate aim that he would pen favourable representations of the new territory of Hawaii, glossing over the rather grubby means by which it was annexed and boosting the wealthy planter class to which he belonged. London was apparently compliant and flattered, enjoying the hospitality showered on him when he first made landfall in the island chain on his highly publicized attempt to sail around the world on his custom-built yacht. Yet in the flow of stories and novels set among the islands, his sharp eye was sensitive to the oppression of the indigenous Hawaiians now dispossessed of their lands and legitimate rulers, the horrors of leprosy brought to the islands by settlement, and the hypocrisies of the missionary–planter class to which Thurston belonged.

In Tichi's study, London genuinely emerges as a publicly engaged intellectual fully cognizant of the major issues of his day. And yet he remains a particular enigma. A powerful voice on behalf of the downtrodden and dispossessed of the new industrial America, London was equally conversant with its new powers and spoils, which he drew upon to the full. Tichi deftly reveals how the new political battlefield of the twentieth century was set to become the realm of public opinion and those who would “mould” it through the media and celebrity. London was very much of, and ahead of, his time.