The Road is a collection of short stories, autobiographical essays, Jack London wrote about his time "on the road". Each story details an aspect of the hobo life at the turn of the 19th century from catching a train to cadging a meal. Jack London was an American author, journalist, and social activist, a pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen, and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.