Jack London is remembered as the rugged frontiersman of the frozen north, but he was also one of America’s first millionaire celebrity authors who studied magazine markets like a science and kept a 15,000-volume library as his working database. This episode starts in San Francisco in 1876 with a mother who survived a suicide attempt during pregnancy, an astrologer father who denied paternity, and Virginia Prentiss, the formerly enslaved woman who became his real source of affection.

We follow the teenager working 12 to 18 hour cannery shifts for ten cents an hour, borrowing money to become an oyster pirate at 15, shoveling coal, marching with unemployed workers and serving 30 days for vagrancy in an Erie County penitentiary, where he resolved to sell his brains instead of his muscles. From saloon-funded Berkeley entrance exams to scurvy in the Klondike, The Call of the Wild in 1903, socialist politics alongside yachts and land, and the failed Beauty Ranch experiment, the episode ends by correcting the suicide myth with the medical record of kidney failure at age 40 in 1916.

• How Oakland librarian Ina Coolbrith and saloon owner John Heinold shaped his self-education
• Why the Klondike gave him the raw material for To Build a Fire even though he found no gold
• How he reverse-engineered the 7,500-word magazine story and faced plagiarism accusations
• The contradictions between his era’s prejudices and his stories championing mixed-race heroes
• His pragmatic first marriage to Bessie Maddern versus his partnership with Charmian Kittredge