Burning Daylight was Jack London's best-selling book in his lifetime, with international sales even greater than his classic White Fang.

The novel takes place in the Yukon Territory in 1893. The main character is Elam Harnish, nicknamed "Burning Daylight."

Elam, a loutish brute and “man’s man” is making a hard living in Alaska and the Northwest Canadian territories as a gold panner and adventurer.

He then becomes highly successful; a merciless exploiter; takes to drinking and becomes the picture of degeneration.

And then a woman—Miss Mason—comes into his life and changes things forever.

Few writers have captured the living texture of life as well as Jack London. Masterworks of intricate creation, each of his works has stood the test of time, and are remarkable for their explorations of animal rights, the legal and political restraints on women of the time, immigrant struggles, the desires for love, family, and companionship, theories of justice for all, and the great capacity for tolerance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

He paints his descriptions of the vastness of nature, the high, red grasses, the endless wind on the plains, the open roads, the extreme poverty of the powerless, the lethal effects of alcohol and gambling, with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones we've just come in from a walk on that very landscape ourselves.
 

JACK LONDON (1876-1916) was an activist, journalist, short-story writer, novelist, and one of the most widely translated of American authors.  He was a child laborer in Oakland at 14, a Bay Area pirate at 15, a transcontinental hobo at 16, an able-bodied seaman at 17, a New York State prisoner at 18, a California ‘work beast’ at 20 and a Yukon prospector at 21. London published over 50 books, and is today most famous for The Sea Wolf, White Fang, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, Burning Daylight, The People of the Abyss, The Road, and John Barleycorn. His influence upon later American writers has been enormous.