Jack London was born and raised in the Bay area and was working full-time by the time he was 13 years old. He borrowed money to enroll in classes at the University of California, Berkeley in 1896, but dropped out after a year and headed to the Yukon for a short lived career as a prospector. Upon his return, London's literary career began in earnest, and until his death in 1916, he wrote short stories, novels, essays, poetry, journalism, and memoirs.
Writing in 1921 of her husband, Charmian London (1871-1955) wrote that "it was upon the liquid two-thirds of the earth's surface that I saw him the most blissfully content. Dawn or twilight, he loved the way of a boat upon the sea... he would stand rapt in healthful ecstasy of sheer being, lord of life and the harnessed powers of nature, unheedful of physical strain, his own hand directing fate." This deep connection and intimacy with the sea comes through in London's characteristically effective use of short fiction forms.
Able Seaman is a collection of Jack London short-stories and a novella on the topic, characters, and context of sailing, largely centered around the San Francisco Bay in the early 20th Century. Among other stories included in this anthology are London's first published story "Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan" (1893), the novella The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and the short stories that made up London's 1905 collection Tales of the Fish Patrol.