The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild book cover Signet Classic edition cover
Author	Jack London
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Macmillan
Publication date	1903
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	202 pp
ISBN	NA

For other uses, see Call of the Wild (disambiguation)

The Call of the Wild is a novella by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous, frigid Yukon during the days of the 19th century Gold Rushes.

Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is one of London's most read books and it is generally considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is sometimes classified as a juvenile novel, suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler The hero, Buck, is a 4-year-old, 140 lb St. Bernard St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd (i.e., Collie) mix who is abducted from a comfortable life as the pet of Judge Miller in Santa Clara Valley, located in Northern California, by Judge Miller's gardener and sold to a trainer of sled dogs. In a series of episodes, Buck is forced to survive and adapt to brutal and cruel conditions, in Alaska and Yukon. He works pulling sleds with other dogs. He changes hands many times before he is eventually acquired by a kind and loving owner, John Thornton. When Thornton is killed by "Yeehat" Indians, Buck goes into a beastly rage and kills the Indians. Buck returns to the wild and becomes the alpha male of a wolf pack he met a few days after the death of Thornton. Images of death, cruelty, and Darwinian struggle abound. Of the new world Buck enters, London writes "The salient thing of this other world seemed fear." (Such dark themes are typical of Jack London's work, and he defended them in his essay "The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction.")

Literary significance & criticism

The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page [1] states that "Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and Yugoslavia banned all his works as being 'too radical.' Some of London's works were also burned by the Nazis." (These regimes may have been reacting to Jack London's reputation as an outspoken Socialist rather than to the content of the book, which, unlike some of his other novels, has no overt political message).

In 1960, critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild "a beautiful prose poem." Editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn". E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece."

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Several films based on the novel, or at least using elements from it including its title, have been produced; the best-known of these, emphasizing human over canine characters, is the 1935 version starring Clark Gable and Loretta Young. (Young reputedly became pregnant with Gable's child during location shooting for this film.)

There was also a Call of the Wild television series broadcast in 2000.

Footnotes

^ The tribe was Jack London's fictional creation. "There was no tribe of American Indians named Yeehats. London's decision to employ a fictitious tribe is consistent with Northland traditions, however, for it was common to hear tales of barbarous people living in remote and unexplored regions of the territory." (Dyer, 1997)

The main character in the book was based on a St. Bernard / Collie sled dog which belonged to Marshall Bond and his brother Louis the sons of Judge Hiram Bond a mining investor, fruit packer and banker of Santa Clara, California. The Bonds were Jack London's landlords in Dawson during the Fall and Spring of 1897 - 1898 the main year of the Klondike Gold Rush. The London and Bond accounts record that the dog was used by Jack London to accomplish chores for the Bonds and other clients of London's. (Dyer, 1997)

References

• Dyer, Daniel, 1997: The Call of the Wild: Annotated and Illustrated, University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN 0-8061-2920-4

External links

• Text of The Call of the Wild at Berkeley's Sunsite
• The Call of the Wild at Project Gutenberg
• White Fang compared to The Call of the Wild - Literary analysis
• Free audiobook from LibriVox