- The Star Rover
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name = The Star Rover
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author =Jack London
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country =United States
language = English
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release_date = 1915
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followed_by ="The Star Rover" is a novel by American writer
Jack London published in 1915 (published in theUnited Kingdom as "The Jacket"). It is a story ofreincarnation .It evokes divided opinion; many London aficionados esteem it highly. Alexander Kershaw calls it a "cult classic" and London's "most soulful work." "It is unlike any other Jack London novel. Biographer Russ Kingman refers to it as marking "an abrupt change in London's literary style."
A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in
San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.:I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt.
The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are in effect a series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved, short stories. The writing sometimes rises to the level of poetry, sometimes sinks to the level of
purple prose . According to Kevin Starr, London planned an historical novel of the West and used some of this material in "The Star Rover."The jacket itself was actually used at San Quentin at the time and Jack London's descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, which is also the name of a character in the novel.
"The Star Rover" (1920 movie)
A silent film based on "The Star Rover" was released in 1920, starring Courtenay Foote, a well-known stage and screen actor of the time, as Dr. Hugh Standing.
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The Jacket " (2005 movie)
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