Christopher Bellew is a success in the eyes of the world, engaged with the San Francisco paper and penning stories daily... but for no pay. When Klondike fever strikes the region, he sees his chance to break from drudgery - starting him on a journey that takes him over mountain passes and down swirling rapids, removing him forever from the world he knew and the man he was. Taking the name "Smoke," he learns to thrive and flourish in the wilds of the frontier. "Smoke Bellew," first published in 1912, tells a tale as bracing and fast-moving as an icy mountain stream. Includes: - The Taste of the Meat - The Stampede to Squaw Creek - Shorty Dreams - The Man on the Other Bank - The Race for Number One.. John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916)was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". 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. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction expos The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes... P. J. MONAHAN (1882-1931) Patrick J. Monahan was born Patrick John Sullivan on January 4, 1882 in Des Moines, Iowa. His father, Eugene John Sullivan, was born 1850 in Ireland. He was a coal miner. His mother was Mary Maggie Sullivan, born 1858 in Ireland. They married in Ireland in 1871 and then immigrated to the U.S. They settled in Des Moines, where they had three children. Their first child, Mary, was born 1880. Patrick was their second child and his younger brother, Eugene, was born in 1884. They lived in Des Moines on Eighth Street. In 1891 his family became ill with influenza. He and his younger brother recovered, but his father, mother and older sister all died. He was eight and Eugene was six. They were raised by charitable neighbors, James and Rose Ellen Monahan, who lived one block away on Ninth Street. In 1895 at the age of thirteen he finished schooling and went to work. This was customary for most American teenagers at that time. He worked at a local newspaper, The Des Moines Mail & Times, where he became interested in a career as a newspaper cartoonist. Over the next five years he studied at the Des Moines Academy of Art. The school was charitably sponsored by the Des Moines Women's Club and the Iowa Society of Fine Arts. He studied with Charles Atherton Cumming(1858-1932) and A. C. Macy, who had previously headed the art department at Drake University in Des Moines. In 1900 the academy was renamed the Cumming School of Art......