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Jack London published his first essay at the age of seventeen. Before that, he had experienced hardships. After his stepfather's death, the young man's family found themselves almost without a means of subsistence. Jack worked as a newspaper delivery boy and cleaned floors in pubs. After school, he worked at a canning factory, fished for oysters, and earned calluses on a fishing boat off the coast of Japan. Poverty followed him closely for a long time. The California University, which the ambitious and talented Jack managed to enter, soon had to be abandoned for a trivial reason — there was a catastrophic lack of money for his studies. London's attempts to break free from poverty led him to Alaska in 1897, where the gold rush was beginning. A year later, Jack returned to San Francisco without gold, with scurvy, and with new vivid impressions that ultimately turned out to be more valuable than gold dust and nuggets. After returning from Alaska, London decided to take literature seriously and succeeded in this field. The heroes of his stories are steadfast, tough people, yet not devoid of romantic traits. He encountered such pioneers in reality and became a pioneer himself, but not in the expanses of Alaska, but in literature. No one had written about the struggle for life in such a way before London.

The book is adorned with illustrations by two American artists: Anton Otto Fisher and Patrick John Monahan. Fisher was born in Germany. At the very end of the 19th century, he became a sailor in the merchant marine and crossed the Atlantic several times. It's not surprising that later the maritime theme occupied a special place in his drawings. Fisher received the basics of artistic education from the famous American illustrator Arthur Frost. Then came his studies in France, where his mentor at the Paris Academy Julian was the painter Jean-Paul Laurens. Upon returning to the USA, Fisher opened his own studio. He began collaborating with various magazines and publishing houses, creating numerous illustrations for the works of Robert Stevenson, Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and Jack London.
Unlike Fisher, Patrick John Monahan was born in the USA. He started working early at one of the newspapers in the state of Iowa. Having seen the drawings of a local caricaturist, Patrick decided to become an artist himself. He honed his skills for five years at the Art Academy of his hometown of Des Moines. In 1907, Monahan moved to New York, opened an art studio on Eighth Avenue, and soon his illustrations began to appear in many city magazines. In 1924, he left New York and moved to the state of New Jersey. There, on thirty-two acres of land, Patrick founded an art studio, where he worked until the end of his life.