CALL OF THE WILD

Call of the Wild is the story of Buck, a magnificent dog who is stolen from his idyllic life and sold for use on a Yukon dogsled team. His travels are not only of a physical nature, as he learns hard discipline from men who must discipline their dog teams, but his own journey back to his primordial roots in the frozen tundra - the roots of wolf. This amazing story of transformation is beautifully written and provides a glimpse of the hard life in the Yukon Territory during the 1900s.

____

Jack London

Jack London, born in San Francisco, California is best known for his books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, but left over fifty volumes of novels, stories, journalism and essays when he died at the age of 40. His writings explored three geographic regions and their cultures, the Yukon, California and the South Pacific.

During his adolescence he worked at various hard labor jobs, pirated for oysters on San Francisco Bay, served on a fish patrol to capture poachers, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, joined Kelly's Army of unemployed working men, hoboed around the country, and returned to attend high school at age 19. In the process, he became acquainted with socialism and was known as the Boy Socialist of Oakland for his street corner oratory. In fact, he would run unsuccessfully several times on the socialist ticket as mayor.

Jack had wanted to become a writer to escape a life of work in a factory, but was largely unsuccessful until he spent the winter of 1897 in the Yukon. This experience provided him the fodder for his first published stories and from that point he was a highly disciplined writer. Although The Call of the Wild brought him lasting fame, many of his short stories deserve to be called classics, as does his critique of capitalism and poverty in The People of the Abyss (1903), and his stark discussion of alcoholism in John Barleycorn (1913). London's long voyage (1907-09) across the Pacific in a small boat provided material for books and stories about Polynesian and Melanesian cultures. He was instrumental in breaking the taboo over leprosy and popularizing Hawaii as a tourist spot with his journalistic non-fiction writings.

He was among the most influential figures of his day, who understood how to create a public persona and use the media to market his self-created image.