Короткий английский текст для практики чтения и перевода.
His early life was not an easy one. His parents had separated before he was born, and his mother remarried. When a series of misfortunes wrecked the family’s finances, the boy was forced to work at an early age, bringing every penny home to help support his parents.
From the time he had learned to read, he had been fond of books and spent every spare minute he could in the public library. The stories he read, combined with his natural curiosity, had aroused in him a thirst for adventure which was to remain unquenched all of his life. When he was fifteen, he scraped enough money together to buy a small boat and began raiding the privately owned oyster beds1 in the bay near his Oakland, California home. For a while he was earning good money, but there were others in the same business. After one of many bloody battles with rival oyster pirates, his boat was destroyed.
At sixteen he went to sea aboard a schooner on a seal-hunting mission off the coast of Siberia. When he returned, he lived the life of a hobo, bumming his way around the country. At the age of nineteen he felt he needed an education, so he enrolled in high school for a short time, then took and passed a university entrance exam. He found himself too impatient for college, however, and soon he was off again, this time to the gold rush in Alaska’s Klondike. When he returned home, he settled down at last to fulfil his real destiny.
He had always dreamed of becoming a writer, and now he set himself to the task. Drawing from his own experience, he wrote hundreds of stories, and his room was filled with rejected manuscripts before he finally began to sell a few. He was twenty-seven when the story which was to start him on his way to fame was printed. This tale of the frozen North was titled The Call of the Wild. It was followed by White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and many more adventure classics written by the one-time hobo, sailor, and pirate who became one of the most powerful storytellers the world has ever known. His name was Jack London.
From “America s Great” by Gene Moss
