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GUEST: Cecelia Tichi, author of Jack London, A Writer’s Fight for a Better America, and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and professor of American Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her earlier books is Civic Passions, Exposes, and Excess, and Embodiment of a Nation.

*This segment was broadcast online only on Sept. 24, 2015.

When I was a child, one of my very few exposures to American literature was White Fang, the acclaimed novel by Jack London, set in the ice and snow of the Yukon Territory of Canada. Indeed, most US-born Americans know of Jack London through his literary works. But, few know that London was also an avowed socialist, fierce orator, and considered himself a revolutionary.

In 1914 London told a Los Angeles Times reporter “If, just by wishing, I could change America and Americans in one way I would change the economic organization of American so that true opportunity would obtain; and service, instead of profits, would be the idea, the ideal, and the ambition animating every citizen.”