It’s the birthday of two California-born authors born seventy-six years apart, Jack London and Walter Mosley. London (real name John Griffith Chaney) was born in San Francisco in 1876 and is perhaps best known for his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Mosley was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and is best known for his period mysteries featuring detective “Easy” Rawlins.

London quit school at 14, went to Japan as a sailor, and hoboed around the U.S. on trains. He saw a lot of poverty and unemployment and became a militant socialist. After one year at UC Berkeley, he quit to join the Klondike gold rush, and when that didn’t pan out (get it? “pan out”? gold?), he focused on becoming a writer. He made his name writing stories and novels of adventure in Alaska and became one of the most popular and highly paid American authors of his time. But while he was prolific (producing more than fifty books in his lifetime), the quality of his writing was sometimes, well, sketchy… Here’s how Annie Dillard put it in The Writing Life: “In subsequent years, once [London] had a book of his own underway, he set his alarm to wake him after four hours’ sleep. Often he slept through the alarm, so, by his own account, he rigged it to drop a weight on his head. I cannot say I believe this, though a novel like The Sea-Wolf is strong evidence that some sort of weight fell on his head with some sort of frequency—but you wouldn’t think a man would take credit for it.” Burn. Dillard’s comment is worthy of Michiko Kakutani (born January 9).

Mosley was born of a Jewish mother and an African American father who tried to get married in California in 1951 (which was theoretically legal) but were unable to convince anyone to give them a marriage license; race relations became an important theme in much of Mosley’s work. As a young man, he dinked around a bit, dropping out of one college and studying political science at another (Johnson State College), then worked as a computer programmer before writing his first novel in his thirties, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). He has since written more than forty books, from mysteries to science fiction to erotica to social commentary, and his exploration of race issues and morality took the mystery genre to new levels. According to his web site, he is one of the most “versatile and admired writers in America today,” so it must be true. And if you nose around online for images, you’ll see that he wears just the sort of hat an author of mysteries should wear, and wears it well.

We can only speculate what Jack London’s web site would have said about him. In most of his photos, he is hatless with a thick head of wavy hair.

Have an excellent Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.