The Sea-Wolf

A pampered literary critic named Humphrey Van Weyden is thrown from a ferry into San Francisco Bay and fished out by the Ghost, a seal-hunting schooner commanded by Wolf Larsen, one of the most memorable brutes in American fiction. Larsen is a self-taught philosopher and a merciless tyrant, and Jack London uses the clash between his raw materialism and Humphrey’s soft idealism to argue about strength, survival, and the worth of a single life. As Humphrey hardens into a capable man and a shipwrecked woman poet joins the doomed voyage, the story turns from sea adventure into a test of everything he believes. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB edition.