The film starred Michael O'Shea as Jack London and Susan Hayward with Osa Massen, Harry Davenport, Frank Craven and Virginia Mayo.

In Oakland in 1890, after an accident involving a female colleague at the factory where he works, the young London quits and borrows money to buy a boat in which to illegally harvest oysters.

Snowed in for months he writes Call of the Wild, which he sells to a publisher, who compares him to Rudyard Kipling, one of London's idols.

Despite a promise not to leave Charmian again, London is given another foreign correspondent assignment, this time to Japan, where he is told of the start of the Russo-Japanese War.

In Korea, an army captain reveals the Japanese aim to sack Manchuria and then Mongolia for raw materials as part of a long-term plan to conquer China, and then dominate the US and England.