London was wrapping up the writing of The Star Rover when the First World War began. Although he couldn’t have anticipated the looming cataclysm of August 1914, London’s personal life had been in a shambles since the previous summer. That August, his beloved country estate, Wolf House, had burnt to the ground under mysterious circumstances. In the same year, he penned Jack Barleycorn, an autobiographical novel about what London, a severe alcoholic, called “the clear white light of alcohol”. Olivia Laing, in her fabulous book The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, observes that alcoholic novelists often circle around their disease in their fiction, never quite acknowledging the extent of their own denial. London’s self-described “alcoholic memoir” manages, somehow, to dance around its central subject, never fully acknowledging the substance abuse that would kill him at age forty. “Read John Barleycorn and you will soon enough discover what ails him”, wrote one of London's acquaintances. “The tragedy is that he does not even seem to know how far gone he is.”