The Valley of the Moon

“The story opens in the city slums where Billy Roberts, teamster and ex-prize-fighter, and Saxon Brown, laundry worker, meet and love and marry; it ends out In the open country where, in contact with the soil, Billy and Saxon find new life and new hope. They have courage and strength and faith when the start life together, but the grinding forces of industrialism are almost too much for them. It is the strain of pioneer grit that brought their ancestors across the mountains that saves them. They too become pioneers, and go out from San Francisco to discover California. From one end of the state to the other, they tramp and in the Valley of the Moon find the farm paradise that is — to be their salvation.

“This novel is a novel for all thoughtful readers. It is filled with all the usual Jack London short-comings — the greatest being lack of restraint — but it is at the same time a notably faithful study of a variety of critical social conditions and at the same time a significant story.”

—Boston Transcript


“Jack London’s ’The Valley of the Moon’ is unlike any book of his we have met before, an extremely pleasant and genial book, holding the reader’s attention to the end. As a work of art his story may be compared to the pride of New England housewife, the patchwork quilt. Vivid blocks of realism, brilliant scraps of California scenery, sober bits of preaching, put together rather haphazard, wherever they will be effective.”

—The New York Sun