Vagrant deckhand, socialist, gold-digger and alcoholic, Jack London died, burnt-out, at the age of forty. The "Sea-Wolf" is based on his own brutal experiences on a seal-hunting voyage in a world where 'might is right and weakness is wrong'.
Wolf Larsen is the demonic captain of the schooner "Ghost", a man on the edge of the abyss, as haunting a creation as Melville's Captain Ahab or Conrad's Nostromo. London's passion for 'the essence of life... the potency of motion' marks him as the forerunner of such great twentieth-century writers as Lowry, Dos Passos and Kerouac.