This is kind of a wild book! Like most of his work, Jack London’s fourth novel borrows a lot from his life on the sea and from his studies, and channels much of it into his antagonist Wolf Larsen. The result is one of the more compelling figures in fiction, making The Sea-Wolf one of the more underrated pieces of Jack London’s body of work, if not in all of classic American literature. This essay also contains spoilers, so you may want to skip this section until after you finish.

The Sea-Wolf Main Characters

Humphrey Van Weyden is kind of a bookish trust fund kid who might be referred to as a metrosexual hipster had those terms existed 100 years ago. Having never really worked laboriously a single day in his life, he naturally has a pretty romantic idea of sailing the high seas that gets squashed very soon after the beginning of the book when the ferry he is riding shipwrecks and he is rescued by the Ghost and its captain Wolf Larsen. 

Wolf is abusive in pretty much all the ways a person can be abusive: emotionally, physically, verbally, and psychologically. “He’s not blackhearted like some men,” Hump tells us, because “’Tis no heart he has at all.” And Wolf is “not immoral. Merely unmoral.”

Put frankly, Wolf is probably a sociopath by today’s definition, and after members of his crew have had enough of the many ways Wolf can be abusive, plan a mutiny against him. Even with at least half a dozen men siding with the mutiny, Wolf still manages to overcome the attacks through his sheer tenacity and strength. All of that monstrosity and brutality takes a toll on Wolf’s body, though, as he is vulnerable to vicious headaches that eventually lead to blindness, and the stress of being an elite asshole eventually leads to a stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed.

The love interest comes in the form of Maud Brewster, a woman who was among the castaways picked up by the Ghost, and it turns out she and Humphrey know each other as writers. Both Hump and Wolf take an interest, but the romantic subplot feels forced and tacked-on, a take that Ambrose Bierce agreed with in his review of the book. In fact, he called it “awful,” even though he dug everything else about the book. Read and see for yourself!

How Jack London’s Own Life Influenced The Sea-Wolf

According to London, Wolf is based on a sailor he knew named Captain Alexander McLean, who was once the sheriff of Nome, Alaska. It’s also easy to notice how often wolf — both the animal and the name — comes up when we talk about Jack London. Call of the Wild and White Fang are about the descendants of wolves who tap into those wolf-like instinct, and London’s pals often called him Wolf. Later in life when London achieved fame and riches through his writing, he built a mansion and called it Wolf House. Clearly Jackie had a thing for the wolf!

Jack London flexes his influences here, particularly that idea of the Nietzsche superman, and the smarty-pants narrator also makes references to John Milton and Charles Darwin and Omar Khayyam and Schopenhauer, too. He packs a lot in 200-some pages, and while the stories are very different, it is hard not to see Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous as an influence.

There are other similarities to London’s own life and The Sea-Wolf. Like the eponymous character in Martin Eden, which would be published a few years later, both Jack and Wolf Larsen are autodidacts, the word we give to folks who teach and educate themselves just for the love and thirst of learning. London also had a lot of experience living life on water and working on ships as a sailor, and this is his second novel — the wholesome Cruise of the Dazzler was first and his debut — that primarily takes place on boats. There are a lot of autobiographical details in Jack London’s oeuvre, and this book is no exception.

Moby Dick Versus The Sea-Wolf

This is something of a companion piece to Moby Dick. Both American literary classics contain relatively humble protagonists who are attracted to life at sea, and both men work under larger-than-life captains who dominate their ships, albeit in much different ways. They’re also both happen to be pretty darn smart. Ahab is often poetic and philosophical, and Wolf has a lot to say about his own takes on anything from morality to evolution. While it would be reductive — if not pejorative — to refer to these two men as crazy, it is clear that they have so much going on inside their brains that it ends up to their detriment by the end. The two captains are able to inspire both fear and respect and admiration from Ishmael and Humphrey, and both the protagonist notice how their obsession isolates them from the rest of humanity.

Click on the cover to buy your own copy of The Sea-Wolf!

We also covered other works of Jack London, including White Fang and Call of the Wild and Iron Heel and The Game and The Sea-Wolf and John Barleycorn and Before Adam and Martin Eden and A Daughter of the Snows and The Cruise of the Dazzler.

Cover Image Credit: The image of the poster for the 1926 American adaptation of The Sea Wolf is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. The image of the ebook is circa 1921 and is also part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

*****This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. Thank you for reading Content Bash!*****