Today in literary history: June 20

Here's what happened on June 20 in literary history.

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Jack London’s The Call of the Wild began serialization in the Saturday Evening Post on June 20, 1903. It would be published in a full volume later that year.

The Call of the Wild was an immediate success and is, to this day, the best-known of London's fifty books (a mix of fiction and nonfiction).

His prolificacy meant he was the highest-paid writer in the United States at one time (though his spending habits kept pace with his income); additionally, he was among the first writers to work with a film company, adapting his first novel, The Sea-Wolf, into a full-length movie.

Beyond his writing, London was also known for his strong and vocal Socialist beliefs, as seen in his activism, his writing, and in his two candidacies for mayor of Oakland.

As a result, The Call of the Wild was banned in 1929 in both Italy and Yugoslavia, and the Nazi Party burned it in 1933 for the same reasons.

On the flip side, though, Russians loved London's work. It's said that a commemorative edition of his works published there in 1956 sold out in five hours.

Sources: ThoughtCo. and Encyclopedia Britannica entries for Jack London and The Call of the Wild

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The movie adaptation of Jaws was released on June 20, 1975.

In 1964, writer Peter Benchley read an article about a fisherman who caught a 4,550-pound great white shark not far offshore from Montauk, Long Island.

He wondered what would happen if a shark that size appeared in a resort town, then let the idea lie fallow in his brain for several years.

But in the early 1970s, Benchley came back to that curiosity. The end result was the novel Jaws, released in 1974 and adapted as a movie the next year.

While the book was a bestseller, its popularity was far outpaced by that of the eventual screen adaptation — to the surprise of some of the people behind its creation.

Seasickness, cast clashes, and issues with the three on-set animatronic whales put the whole effort a hundred-plus days behind schedule and doubled its budget; the movie's co-writer recalled director Steven Spielberg's nails being bitten down to nubs.

Once the final product made it in front of test audiences, though, it was clear that it was worth the wait. Another member of the production team remembered viewers screaming so violently that their popcorn went flying.

Universal quickly poured money into marketing Jaws; the movie became the first one ever to break $100 million at the box office and forever changed the way that Hollywood scheduled, promoted, and merchandised its films.

Sources: Variety and History.com