Here’s a terrifically interesting story of romantic adventure, and love, between two very heterosexual men.
Did I mention they are heterosexual?
Well they are.
They have wives!
That’s all there is to it.
The Heathen interweaves Jack London’s racist ideas with his experiences as a sailor to make a truly he-manish tale of two macho sailors who form an unbreakable seventeen-year bond after being shipwrecked in the South Pacific. This is manly beefcake Jack London from 1910, working the blood and breed obsessed vein of fiction and friendship that Robert E. Howard did so masterfully in stories like Queen Of The Black Coast and Hills Of The Dead.
Unfortunately, the version that my good friend Gregg Margarite read for LibriVox, a couple years back, was abridged (or perhaps sanitized) – the PDF version below includes a couple of extra lines here, there, and at the end. Important lines. It also includes more swearing.
Damn those abridgers and sanitizers.
Gregg is dead.
I’m confident he’d have wanted to have read the unsanitized and unabridged original had it been available.
The Heathen
By Jack London; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 46 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: December 3, 2009
First published in Everybody’s Magazine, August 1910.
Here’s a beautiful |PDF| made from a scan of the magazine.
Here are the rest of the terrific illustrations by Anton Fischer:
Posted by Jesse Willis