Jack London Valley of the Moon

Frontispiece to the 1913 first edition.

The Valley of the Moon (1913) is a novel by American writer Jack London (as well as the mythic and romantic name for the wine-growing Sonoma Valley of California). The valley where it is set, is located north of the San Francisco Bay Area in Sonoma County, California, where Jack London was a resident; he built his ranch in Glen Ellen. Read more on Wikipedia

Lowry refers to Valley of the Moon in his novel Under The Volcano; "The bag, decanted on the faded rustic seat, disgorged into its lid....a second-hand copy of Jack London' Valley of the Moon, bought yesterday for fifteen centavos at the German bookshop opposite Sandborns in Mexico City." (Pg. 99) and later when Hugh muses in Chapter 6; "..and perhaps it was true too he had been reading too much Jack London even then, The Sea Wolf, and now in 1938 he had advanced to the virile Valley of the Moon (his favourite was The Jacket)...." (Pg. 161)

Chris Ackerley suggests; " Lowry's ‘virile’ implies a judgment on Hugh’s "maturity", the essence of the book being the transition from the fiercely individualist struggle depicted in The Sea-Wolf towards a socialist theory of return to the land as a next step in human evolution." (The Malcolm Lowry Project).