杰克·伦敦/Jack London
杰克·伦敦（Jack London，1876—1916），美国著名作家之一。出身贫困，童年以从事繁重劳动谋生，先后做过工人、水手、司炉、淘金者，甚至流浪汉。艰苦的生活使他深切体会到损贫利富的社会弊端，由此对社会问题深感兴趣，自称社会学者，从事过工人运动。他的短篇小说独树一帜，情节紧凑，人物形象栩栩如生，深受读者喜爱。代表作有《狼的儿子》《荒野的呼唤》《铁蹄》等。
John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, fattened against the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his presence.
Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort；so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, defnite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the frst time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed；and yet, at the frst moment of meeting, we say：“I do not like that man.”Why do we not like him?Ah, we do not know why；we know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.
What right had such a man to be happy?Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him！Ah！How it grated on my soul that he should be so happy！Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself-before I met John Claverhouse.
But his laugh！It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the felds to spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed, his great“Ha! ha！”and“Ho! ho！”rose up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe and clench my nails into my palms.