The Valley of the Moon is Jock London's story of a working-class couple, Billy and Saxon Roberts, who are struggling laborers in Oakland at the turn of the 19th Century. They left city life searching Central and Northern California for a suitable farmland to own. The Valley of the Moon is notable for the scenes in which the proletarian hero enjoys fellowship with the artists' colony in Carmel, and he settles in the Valley of the Moon located north of the San Francisco Bay Area in Sonoma County, California. 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.