The Abysmal Brute
By Jack London
Sam Stubener, a boxing manager in San Francisco, travels to a remote log cabin in northern California to get a letter from retired boxer Pat Glendon, who lives there with his son, Pat Glendon Jr, a promising young boxer. Pat Jr fights well; otherwise, he knows little of city life; he hunts and fishes in the forest, reads poetry and avoids women. Sam brings Pat Jr back to San Francisco.
Although Sam and Pat know he could win a fight with a top boxer, the boxing conventions require that Pat starts with a lower-ranking boxer. In his first three fights, he knocks out his opponent immediately with one punch. Sam tells Pat to make his fights last longer; since Pat says he is the master of his opponent “at any inch or second of the fight”, they agree on which round the knockout will happen. Pat’s career takes off, winning fights worldwide. The newspapers, who interpret his detachment from the real world as unsociability, call him “The Abysmal Brute.” Sam protects him from boxing corruption. Pat is unaware that Sam is using his knowledge of the timing of the knockout in a betting syndicate. Pat is interviewed by Maud Sangster, a journalist from a family of millionaires, at the Cliff House in San Francisco.
They immediately fall in love. Maud tells him she has heard in which round he will knock out his opponent in his next fight, and Pat wonders how his agreement with Sam became known. He tells her the knockout will be in a later round; this is to be a secret. When his opponent is knocked out in the round, initially agreeing with Sam, Maud is angry with Pat. He tells her his opponent faked the knockout; he is beginning to realize the corruption in the game and says he is quitting boxing, although Sam has arranged a fight against top boxer Tom Cannam. Pat and Maud get married; their honeymoon is spent in the forest and mountains. He decides to return for the battle with Cannam. The event, promoted as an essential occasion, starts with speeches from boxing legends, to which, unexpectedly, he adds his own, describing the corruption in boxing. This has a sensational effect; he knocks out Cannam in the first round, and the event ends in an uproar.
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Jack London
John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist.
Biography
A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing.[6] He was also an innovator in the genre later known as science fiction. London was part of the radical literary group “The Crowd” in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights, and socialism.
London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during 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 about the South Pacific in stories such as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen”. Jack London was born on January 12, 1876. His mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist, claiming to channel the spirit of a Sauk chief, Black Hawk.
Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe London’s father was astrologer William Chaney. Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to London’s mother Flora Wellman as having been “his wife”; he also cites an advertisement in which Flora called herself “Florence Wellman Chaney”.
Jack London
