Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Jack London trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jack London trivia for book clubs, English classes and anyone who read The Call of the Wild as a kid and never quite forgot it. The quiz follows London from his birth in 1876 through oyster piracy on the bay, a sealing voyage to Japan, thirty days in a Buffalo jail for vagrancy, the Klondike Gold Rush that cost him his front teeth, and the magazine boom that made him one of the first American writers to get rich from fiction. The questions cover the books in detail - Buck, Spitz and John Thornton, the wolfdog of White Fang, Wolf Larsen and the schooner Ghost, Martin Eden and The Iron Heel - as well as London's two marriages, his war reporting in Korea, the yacht Snark, his socialist runs for mayor of Oakland, the plagiarism rows, Beauty Ranch, the burning of Wolf House and his death at forty. Easy questions come first in spirit; a few at the end will test genuine London obsessives. Every answer has been checked against a reference page, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the name of the St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd mix at the center of The Call of the Wild?
Buck
He starts the novel as a pampered 140-pound pet in California's Santa Clara Valley before being stolen and sold north.
Q 02Which 1906 Jack London novel follows a wolfdog's journey from the wild to domestication?
White Fang
It was written as a companion and thematic mirror to The Call of the Wild, running the journey in the opposite direction.
Q 03In which California city was Jack London born?
San Francisco
The house near Third and Brannan Streets burned in the fire after the 1906 earthquake; a plaque marks the site.
Q 04In what year was Jack London born?
1876
He was born John Griffith Chaney; his mother married John London later that year and the boy took his stepfather's surname.
Q 05How old was Jack London when he died in November 1916?
40
He died on a sleeping porch at his ranch, suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and kidney failure.
Q 06Which magazine serialized The Call of the Wild in the summer of 1903?
The Saturday Evening Post
The magazine paid London for the story; Macmillan took the book rights and its promotional push made the novel a hit.
Q 07Which disease did London develop in the Klondike goldfields, costing him his four front teeth?
Scurvy
Father William Judge, 'the Saint of Dawson', ran the shelter that fed and treated London and other malnourished stampeders.
Q 08What was the name of the sloop the teenage London bought to become an oyster pirate?
Razzle-Dazzle
He bought it from an oyster pirate called French Frank and, after it was wrecked, switched sides to join the California Fish Patrol.
Q 09Who was Virginia 'Jennie' Prentiss in Jack London's life?
The former slave who wet-nursed him and became a maternal figure
London later called her his primary source of love and affection as a child, and it was Prentiss who lent him the money for his first boat.
Q 10Which Oakland librarian mentored young London and became California's first poet laureate?
Ina Coolbrith
London found her at the Oakland Public Library in 1886; she was also a friend of Mark Twain and Bret Harte.
Q 11In 1893 London signed on to a sealing schooner bound for the coast of Japan. What was the ship called?
Sophie Sutherland
The voyage produced his first published piece, 'Typhoon off the Coast of Japan', an account of the trip.
Q 12In 1894 London spent 30 days in jail for vagrancy. Where?
Buffalo, New York
He was tramping east with Coxey's Army when he was picked up; the Erie County Penitentiary appears in his memoir The Road.
Q 13In which Oakland bar did the schoolboy Jack London study, its owner lending him tuition money?
Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon
Q 21London married Bessie Maddern on 7 April 1900, the day his first book came out. Which book?
The Son of the Wolf
Both admitted publicly they married from friendship and a wish for sturdy children rather than love; the marriage lasted four years.
Q 22Who did Jack London marry in 1905, a woman five years his senior whom he called 'Mate-Woman'?
Charmian Kittredge
She sailed with him on his 1907 Pacific cruise and, after her death in 1955, was buried beside him under the same mossy boulder on the ranch.
Q 23With whom did London co-write The Kempton-Wace Letters, an epistolary novel about love?
Anna Strunsky
The port-side bar is now unofficially called Jack London's Rendezvous, and it was where he met the sea captain who inspired Wolf Larsen.
Q 14Wolf Larsen, the amoral captain of The Sea-Wolf, was based on which real seafarer?
Alexander McLean
McLean, a Nova Scotia-born sealing captain notorious for his cruelty, was at one time the Sheriff of Nome, Alaska.
Q 15Who is the narrator and protagonist of The Sea-Wolf, a literary critic rescued after a ferry collision?
Humphrey Van Weyden
Larsen nicknames him 'Hump' and forces the soft intellectual to work as a cabin boy and learn to fight.
Q 16What is the name of Wolf Larsen's seal-hunting schooner in The Sea-Wolf?
The Ghost
The novel's first printing of forty thousand copies sold out before publication on the strength of The Call of the Wild.
Q 17Which magazine's $40 for 'A Thousand Deaths' did London say 'literally and literarily' saved his career?
The Black Cat
He called it the first money he ever received for a story, and it arrived just as he was close to giving up.
Q 18How much did The Overland Monthly offer London for his early story 'To the Man On Trail'?
Five dollars
The tiny fee, slowly paid, nearly drove him to abandon writing altogether.
Q 19Which poet became London's best friend, addressed as 'Greek' in letters that London signed 'Wolf'?
George Sterling
The nickname came from Sterling's aquiline nose and classical profile; London later put him in two novels as Russ Brissenden and Mark Hall.
Q 20London's struggle to get published is fictionalised in which semi-autobiographical novel?
Martin Eden
London said one of his motifs was an attack on individualism in the person of the hero, and complained that not a single reviewer noticed.
Strunsky wrote the romantic 'Dane Kempton' letters while London, as 'Herbert Wace', argued for a scientific, Darwinian view of marriage.
Q 24In 1904 London went to Korea as a war correspondent to cover which conflict?
The Russo-Japanese War
He was arrested three times in four months by the Japanese, once for straying too close to the Manchurian border.
Q 25Whose intervention freed London after the Japanese arrested him a third time in 1904?
President Theodore Roosevelt
London had accused the assistants of stealing fodder for his horse; he left the front in June 1904.
Q 26What was the name of the yacht on which the Londons cruised to Hawaii and Australia in 1907?
Snark
The name comes from Lewis Carroll; London and his wife picked up tropical infections including yaws on the voyage.
Q 27In which Sonoma County town did London buy the 1,000-acre property he called Beauty Ranch in 1905?
Glen Ellen
He wrote that next to his wife the ranch was the dearest thing in the world to him, and it is now Jack London State Historic Park.
Q 28What was the name of the huge stone mansion on London's ranch that burned down before he could move in?
Wolf House
It cost him $80,000, and after his death his ashes were buried under a rock that had belonged to it.
Q 29What pioneering farm structure was London proud to have built first in California?
The state's first concrete silo
He studied agricultural manuals and hoped to adapt Asian sustainable farming to the US, but the ranch was an economic failure.
Q 30What cause of death appears on Jack London's death certificate?
Uremia
Older sources call his death a suicide, but most biographers now agree he died of kidney failure aggravated by an accidental morphine overdose.