The Sea-Wolf

The Sea-Wolf is a novel by the American writer Jack London, published in 1904. Its first printing, forty thousand copies, sold out before the book was released on the strength of the success of his earlier novel, The Call of the Wild.

Humphrey Van Weyden is a critic and a man of books who has never done physical work in his life. When the ferry he is travelling on is lost in a collision in the fog, he is pulled from the sea by the crew of a seal-hunting schooner, and the captain, Wolf Larsen, keeps him aboard and sets him to work in the galley and before the mast.

The novel is the account of what happens to a man of ideas in the hands of a man of force who has thought about the world as well and arrived at conclusions that leave no room for other people. Larsen is a reader, and much of the book is argument as well as action. London is said to have modelled the character in part on a real sailor he had met, and the book was read at once as an extraordinary piece of character drawing as well as a sea story.