Burning Daylight was Jack London's best selling book during his lifetime. The novel takes place in the Yukon Territory in 1893. The main character, nicknamed Burning Daylight, was the most successful entrepreneur of the Alaskan Gold Rush. The story is partially based upon the life of Oakland entrepreneur "Borax" Smith. Jack London was an American author, journalist, and social activist, a pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen, and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.