Wednesday, November 15, 2017
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Fisher Student Center Lumina Theater 1006
Event Type
Film
Contact
Keith Newlin
910-962-3615
Customer
English Department
Event Url
Link
https://events.uncw.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=70774
Jack London: Twentieth-Century Man is
a feature-length documentary film examining the life
and legacy of writer Jack London. Born
into illegitimacy and poverty, largely self-educated, London became the America’s
highest paid writer in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. He turned
his personal adventures into classic tales like The
Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden and "To
Build a Fire," fictionalizing his own journey from common sailor to
captain, criminal to lawman, laborer to landowner, and hobo to millionaire.
London also turned
himself into the nation’s first mass-media celebrity in the process, keenly seizing upon
the cultural and societal changes sweeping early Twentieth-Century
America to create a unique personal “brand,” a century before the practice was
commonplace. His round-the-world trip on a self-designed boat in 1907 became
worldwide news, he did celebrity product endorsements, and in his non-fiction work
and movies his name00ad was often marketed above the title or subject matter.
Many of the topics
London wrote about--race, homelessness, alcoholism, class divides, domestic
violence, war and censorship--are still highly relevant today, and the
evolution of racial, social and cultural attitudes in pre-World War I America
can be traced through his work. London bridged the Victorian and Progressive
Eras and prepared reading audiences for the advent of modernism, influencing
writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac
and Mailer, among others.
Using London’s own
voice from his extensive writings, Jack London: Twentieth-Century Man will expose audiences to the full scope of London’s work beyond his
familiar Klondike tales, highlighting his late-career Hawaii and South Sea
stories. The film also details
London’s remarkably diverse career as a sportswriter, photojournalist, war
correspondent, travel writer, sociologist, political figure, organic farmer and groundbreaking producer in the early days
of silent cinema.
Jack London: Twentieth-Century Man offers a fresh look
at the bold, contradictory genius who remains one of America’s most popular, yet least understood
authors.