AUTHORS WE ADMIRE, PART I

  Jack London

A painstaking restoration of the cottage in Glen Ellem, California, where Jack London lived and died will provide a glimpse of the famous author's life.

He is one of America's most widely read authors throughout the world. Jack is best known as the author of The Call of the Wild, 1903.

Of obscure parentage, meager education and varying occupations, he spent the latter part of his short life in great popularity.

He died at age 40. His productivity was enormous:

• People of the Abyss, 1903
• The Sea Wolf, 1904
• Game, 1905
• White Fang, 1906
• The Iron Heel, 1907
• Martin Eden, 1909
• John Barleycorn, 1913

In spite of these and other socially oriented novels, Jack London's fame rested largely on his work The Call of the Wild, a novel inspired by a concept of brute force which underlies the social behavior of men and animals.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway Home in a Cat Fight:

For more than 40 years, they have lounged on Ernest Hemingway's bed, lolled in his garden, and sipped water from the urinal he dragged home from his favorite saloon — all to the delight of tourists from around the world.

But now the nearly 50 cats at the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum, about half of whom bear a telltale sixth toe on their front paws, are felines non grata — scofflaws who, in the eyes of the federal government, must be better confined or kept under guard.

Cats have been prevalent in Key West since the 1850s, when the nation's southernmost city was a major port. Every boat hauling goods from the Gulf to the Northeast stopped by, and most had cats on board, preferably the six-toed variety. Sailors not only thought they brought good luck at sea, but that they were good rat-catchers.

Hemingway's infatuation with the six-toed creatures would turn them into icons, making them synonymous with his name. In the photo above, Spencer Tracy drinks from the famous urinal.

Günter Grass

The German author Günter Grass has admitted to the mayor of Gdansk, Poland, the city of his birth, that he may have erred in waiting more than 60 years to reveal that he served in the Nazis' Waffen SS as a teenager in World War II, the Associated Press reported. "This silence may be judged as a mistake — that's exactly what's happening." Mr. Grass, below, 78, an honorary citizen of Gdansk and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote to Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, who had the letter read by an actor, Jan Kiszkis, at a news conference. "It may also be condemned."

Mr. Grass went on to say that in 1942, as a "blinded 15-year-old," he asked to serve on the submarines, but was refused. "Instead, in September 1944, at the age of 17 — without my participation — I was made a member of the Waffen SS," he wrote. He added: "I would like to keep the right to say that I have understood this painful lesson that life taught me when I was a young man. My books and my political activity are the proof." After the letter was made public, the former president of Poland, Lech Walesa, a Nobel Prize winner who had threatened to renounce his own honorary citizenship of Gdansk unless Mr. Grass offered an explanation, said he found it "convincing," adding "and from now on I will no longer be in conflict with Mr. Grass."