Jack London, circa 1903 (Courtesy of California State Parks)

By April 1904, 100 years ago this month, Jack London, the illegitimate
 son of Flora Wellman, had become world-famous and the best-selling
American writer west of the Mississippi.

It had been a banner, breakthrough year for the author and “revolutionist.” At a Piedmont hill-top hideaway he called the “Bungalow,” Jack London, a boyish man of 27 years, sat down on his wooden stairwell and admired his handiwork. Above a waving sea of wild poppies, four kites were tied to his front yard’s liquid amber saplings and sailed smartly on a breeze that flowed up the hillsides from the bay several miles below him, making the summer sky a crisp, deep blue. 

Thirty years earlier, logging companies had finished the job of stripping the hills above Oakland and Berkeley of nearly all indigenous old-growth Redwoods so that Jack could see over the few low-standing groves of oaks and eucalyptus and survey a breathtaking panorama of the bay, the Marin headlands, the mouth of the golden gate, the City of San Francisco, the scores of three-masted schooners and steamships, and downtown Oakland, with its sparkling expansive estuary. His unobstructed view from Piedmont was, he thought, like that of a bird of prey hovering on the updrafts, among his kites. More »