About Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin lives and works in Northern California, not far from Jack London’s stomping grounds in Glen Ellen. Though he has been reading Jack London since he was an undergraduate at Columbia College, he did not begin to write about him and his work until the 100th anniversary of The Call of the Wild in 2003. Since then, he has conducted research about London at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, read and reread London’s books, as well as taught his life and his writings at Sonoma State University, where he regularly teaches journalism, memoir writing and communication law.
For nearly two decades, he was a book reviewer for The San Francisco Chronicle, and a cultural critic for The Santa Rosa Press Democrat. In addition to The Radical Jack London, he has published eight other books, including For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation, and My Search for B. Traven, which in 2007 was translated into French and published in France.