 First edition | |
| Author | Jack London |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Macmillan & Co. |
Publication date | 1915 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
The Little Lady of the Big House (1915) is a novel by American writer Jack London. It was his last novel to be published during his lifetime.
The story concerns a love triangle. The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is a rancher with a poetic streak (his "acorn song" recalls London's play, "The Acorn Planters"). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious, athletic, and sexually self-aware woman, who falls in love with Evan Graham, an old friend of her husband. Unable to choose between the two men, she wounds herself mortally with a rifle in what her husband is certain is a suicide.
Biographer Clarice Stasz writes that the book is "not autobiography", but speaks of London's "frank borrowing from his life with Charmian", his second wife, and says it is "psychologically valid as a mirror of events during [the] winter [of 1912–13]". Paula, like Charmian, is subject to insomnia and is unable to bear children. Based on a reading of Charmian's diary, Stasz identifies Evan Graham with two real-life men named Laurie Smith and Allan Dunn. [1] [ page needed ]
Even minor characters can be identified; Forrest's servant Oh My resembles London's valet Nakata. The long-bearded hobo philosopher Aaron Hancock resembles Frank Strawn-Hamilton, who was a long-term guest at the London ranch. Sculptor Haakan Frolich makes an appearance as "the sculptor Froelig", and painter Xavier Martinez appears under his own name.
London said of this novel: "It is all sex from start to finish—in which no sexual adventure is actually achieved or comes within a million miles of being achieved, and in which, nevertheless, is all the guts of sex, coupled with strength." One reviewer disparaged the novel's "erotomania."
Clarice Stasz further comments:
Kevin Starr, in a negative assessment, describes the novel as "wish-fulfilment". He says it
John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
Sarah Miles is a retired English actress. She is known for her roles in films The Servant (1963), Blowup (1966), Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973), White Mischief (1987) and Hope and Glory (1987). For her performance in Ryan's Daughter, Miles received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915. It is science fiction, and involves both mysticism and reincarnation.
Joan London was an American writer and the older of two daughters born to Jack London and his first wife, Elizabeth "Bess" Maddern London.
The Octopus: A Story of California is a 1901 novel by Frank Norris and was the first part of an uncompleted trilogy, The Epic of the Wheat. It describes the wheat industry in California, and the conflicts between wheat growers and a railway company. Norris was inspired to write the novel by the Mussel Slough Tragedy involving the Southern Pacific Railroad. In the novel he depicts the tensions between the railroad, the ranchers and the ranchers' League.
Paula Forrest an Australian actress, best known for playing the role of Shelley Sutherland on the long-running Australian soap opera Home and Away
John Hartford Hoxie was an American rodeo performer and motion-picture actor whose career was most prominent in the silent film era of the 1910s through the 1930s. Hoxie is best recalled for his roles in Westerns and rarely strayed from the genre.
Charmian London was an American writer and the second wife of Jack London.
Jack London State Historic Park, also known as Jack London Home and Ranch, is a California State Historic Park near Glen Ellen, California, United States, situated on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain. It includes the ruins of a house burned a few months before Jack London and family were to move in, a cottage in which they had lived, another house built later, and the graves of Jack London and his wife. The property is both a California Historical Landmark and a National Historic Landmark.
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Beebo Brinker is a lesbian pulp fiction novel written in 1962 by Ann Bannon. It is the last in a series of pulp fiction novels that eventually came to be known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. It was originally published in 1962 by Gold Medal Books, again in 1983 by Naiad Press, and again in 2001 by Cleis Press. Each edition was adorned with a different cover. Although this is the last in the series, it is set first — a prequel to the others. In the order of the series, it follows Journey to a Woman. However, in the order of the events and characters in the series, Beebo Brinker takes place several years before Odd Girl Out does.
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Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan, néeMuzzy, best known by her pseudonym B. M. Bower, was an American author who wrote novels, fictional short stories, and screenplays about the American Old West. Her works, featuring cowboys and cows of the Flying U Ranch in Montana, reflected "an interest in ranch life, the use of working cowboys as main characters, the occasional appearance of eastern types for the sake of contrast, a sense of western geography as simultaneously harsh and grand, and a good deal of factual attention to such matters as cattle branding and bronc busting." She was married three times: to Clayton Bower in 1890, to Bertrand William Sinclair in 1905, and to Robert Elsworth Cowan in 1921. However, she chose to publish under the name Bower.
The Cruise of the Snark (1911) is a non-fictional, illustrated book by Jack London chronicling his sailing adventure in 1907 across the south Pacific in his ketch the Snark. Accompanying London on this voyage was his wife Charmian London and a small crew. London taught himself celestial navigation and the basics of sailing and of boats during the course of this adventure and describes these details to the reader. He visits exotic locations including the Solomon Islands and Hawaii, and his first-person accounts and photographs provide insight into these remote places at the beginning of the 20th century.
James Frank Woods was a major landowner during the Kingdom of Hawaii who was related to royalty and many civil leaders.
Thomas Savage was an American author of novels published between 1944 and 1988. He is best known for his Western novels, which drew on early experiences in the American West.
Joseph Allan Elphinstone Dunn, best known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914 to 1941. He first made a name for himself in Adventure. At the request of Adventure editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Dunn wrote Barehanded Castaways, a novel about people trapped on a desert island which was intended to avoid the usual cliches of such stories. Barehanded Castaways was serialised in 1921 and was well received by Adventure's readers. Well over half of his output appeared in Street & Smith pulps, including People's, Complete Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. Dunn wrote over a thousand stories. He wrote approximately 470 stories for Wild West Weekly alone. His main genres were adventure and western; although he did write a number of detective stories, most of them appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. Dunn wrote The Treasure of Atlantis, a science fiction story about survivals from Atlantis living in the Brazilian jungle. The Treasure of Atlantis was published in All-Around Magazine in 1916 and later reprinted in 1970. He was a specialist in South Sea stories, and pirate stories. He also published a lot of juvenile fiction; including many stories for Boys' Life, primarily in the 1920s. A number of his novel-length stories were reprinted in hardbound, some under the pen name "Joseph Montague" for Street & Smith's Chelsea House imprint; many of his books were issued in the United Kingdom. His stories were frequently syndicated in newspapers, both in America and around the world, making him, for a time, a very widely known author.
Frederick O'Brien was an American author, journalist, hobo, peripatetic world traveler, and public administrator. He wrote three best-selling travel books about French Polynesia between 1919 and 1922: White Shadows in the South Seas, Mystic Isles of the South Seas, and Atolls of the Sun. A movie was made in 1928 of White Shadows in the South Seas.
Netta Eames was born Ninetta Wiley, in Wisconsin on September 26, 1852. She is commonly known as Netta. She is best known as a writer and magazine editor in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As the editor of the San Francisco based Overland Monthly magazine, she became an early proponent of Jack London as a writer. She wrote the 1900 biography.|group=Note}} and a promotional biography of London in Overland Monthly in 1900, which helped to establish his career. Later she was his business manager and neighbor.