The Call of the Wild is an adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively more primitive and wild in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primal instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.
London spent about a year in Yukon, and his observations form much of the material for the book. The story was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and was published later that year in book form. The book's great popularity and success made a reputation for London. As early as 1923, the story was adapted to film, and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations.
One of the most notable adaptations was the 1935 film, starring Clark Gable and Loretta Young, as well as Frank Conroy and Jack Oakie. Considerable liberties were taken with the story line.
Summary
The story opens in 1897 with Buck, a powerful 140-pound St. Bernard–Scotch Shepherd mix, happily living in California's Santa Clara Valley as the pampered pet of Judge Miller and his family. A gardener named Manuel, needing money to pay his gambling debts, kidnaps Buck and sells him. Buck is shipped to Seattle, where he is confined in a crate, starved, and ill-treated. When released, Buck attacks his handler, the "man in the red sweater" who teaches Buck the "law of club and fang" with a severe beating, sufficiently cowing him. The man shows some kindness after Buck demonstrates obedience.
Shortly after, Buck is sold to two French-Canadian mail dispatchers from the Canadian government, François and Perrault, who take him to Alaska. Buck is trained as a sled dog and joins a team in the Klondike region. In addition to Buck, François and Perrault have ten dogs on their team, many but not all of whom are named and have distinct personalities. Buck's teammates teach him how to survive cold winter nights and about pack society. Over the next several weeks on the trail, a bitter rivalry develops between Buck and the lead dog, Spitz, a vicious and quarrelsome white husky. Buck eventually kills Spitz in a fight and becomes the new lead dog.
When François and Perrault complete the round-trip of the Yukon Trail in record time, returning to Skagway with their dispatches, they learn that the government is ending its sled dispatch service. They sell their sled team to a "Scotch half-breed" man who delivers mining supplies. The dogs, accustomed to light work, are now forced to make long, tiring trips, carrying heavy loads to the mining areas. While running the trail, Buck seems to have memories of a canine ancestor who has a short-legged hairy man as a companion. The team is quickly worn down by hard labor, and the wheel dog, Dave, a morose husky, becomes terminally sick and is eventually shot.
With the dogs too exhausted and footsore to be of use, they are sold off to three stampeders from the American Southland (the present-day contiguous United States) — a vain woman named Mercedes, her sheepish husband Charles, and her arrogant brother Hal. Hoping to find gold quickly to restore their family's bankrupt estate, the stampeders ignore others' helpful advice and start their journey ill-prepared for the harsh winter. Hal foolishly creates a team of 14 dogs, believing they will travel faster, and because Mercedes insists on keeping her heavy but useless fashion items. The dogs are overfed and overworked, then starved when food runs low. Most of the dogs die on the trail, leaving only Buck and four others still alive when they pull into the White River.
The group meets John Thornton, an experienced outdoorsman, who notices the dogs' poor condition. The trio ignores Thornton's warnings about crossing the ice and press onward. Exhausted, starving, and sensing the danger ahead, Buck refuses to continue. After Hal whips Buck mercilessly, Thornton hits him and cuts Buck free. The stampeders then try to cross the river, but it breaks under their weight, and they and the surviving dogs quickly succumb to hypothermia in the cold water.
As Thornton nurses Buck back to health, Buck grows to love him. Buck fends off a malicious man named Burton who hit Thornton while the latter was defending an innocent "tenderfoot." This gives Buck a reputation all over the North. Buck also saves Thornton when he falls into a river. After Thornton takes him on trips to pan for gold, a man called Matthewson wagers Thornton on Buck's strength and devotion. Buck pulls a sled with a half-ton () load of flour, breaking it free from the frozen ground, dragging it , and winning Thornton US$1,600 ().
Using his winnings, Thornton pays his debts and continues searching for gold with partners Pete and Hans, sledding Buck and six other dogs to search for a fabled Lost Cabin. Once they locate a suitable gold find, the dogs find they have nothing to do. Buck has more ancestor memories of being with the primitive "hairy man." While Thornton and his two friends pan gold, Buck hears the call of the wild, explores the wilderness, and socializes with a wolf from a local pack. However, Buck does not join the wolves and returns to Thornton. Buck repeatedly goes back and forth between Thornton and the wild, unsure of where he belongs.
Returning to the campsite one day after a four day long moose hunt, he finds Hans, Pete, and Thornton along with their dogs have been murdered by Native American Yeehats. Enraged, Buck kills several Natives to avenge Thornton, then realizes he no longer has any human ties left. He goes looking for his wild brother and encounters a hostile wolf pack. He fights them and wins, then discovers that the lone wolf he had socialized with is a pack member. Buck follows the pack into the forest and answers the call of the wild.
The legend of Buck spreads among other Native Americans as the "Ghost Dog" of the Northland (Alaska and northwestern Canada). Each year, on the anniversary of his attack on the Yeehats, Buck returns to the former campsite where he was last with Thornton to mourn his death. Every winter, leading the wolf pack, Buck wreaks vengeance on the Yeehats "as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack."
Background
California native Jack London had traveled around the United States as a hobo, returned to California to finish high school (he dropped out at age 14), and spent a year in college at Berkeley, when in 1897 he went to the Klondike by way of Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. Later, he said of the experience: "It was in the Klondike I found myself."
He left California in July and traveled by boat to Dyea, Alaska, where he landed and went inland. To reach the goldfields, he and his party transported their gear over the Chilkoot Pass, often carrying loads as heavy as on their backs. They were successful in staking claims to eight gold mines along the Stewart River.
London stayed in the Klondike for almost a year, living temporarily in the frontier town of Dawson City, before moving to a nearby winter camp, where he spent the winter in a temporary shelter reading books he had brought: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and John Milton's Paradise Lost. In the winter of 1898, Dawson City was a city comprising about 30,000 miners, a saloon, an opera house, and a street of brothels.
In the spring, as the annual gold stampeders began to stream in, London left. He had contracted scurvy, common in the Arctic winters where fresh produce was unavailable. When his gums began to swell he decided to return to California. With his companions, he rafted down the Yukon River, through portions of the wildest territory in the region, until they reached St. Michael. There, he hired himself out on a boat to earn return passage to San Francisco.
In Alaska, London found the material that inspired him to write The Call of the Wild. Dyea Beach was the primary point of arrival for miners when London traveled through there, but because its access was treacherous Skagway soon became the new arrival point for prospectors. To reach the Klondike, miners had to navigate White Pass, known as "Dead Horse Pass", where horse carcasses littered the route because they could not survive the harsh and steep ascent. Horses were replaced with dogs as pack animals to transport material over the pass; particularly strong dogs with thick fur were "much desired, scarce and high in price".
London would have seen many dogs, especially prized husky sled dogs, in Dawson City and the winter camps situated close to the main sled route. He was friends with Marshall Latham Bond and his brother Louis Whitford Bond, the owners of a mixed St. Bernard-Scotch Collie dog about which London later wrote: "Yes, Buck is based on your dog at Dawson." Beinecke Library at Yale University holds a photograph of Bond's dog, taken during London's stay in the Klondike in 1897. The depiction of the California ranch at the beginning of the story was based on the Bond family ranch.
Publication history On his return to California, London was unable to find work and relied on odd jobs such as cutting grass. He submitted a query letter to the San Francisco Bulletin proposing a story about his Alaskan adventure, but the idea was rejected because, as the editor told him, "Interest in Alaska has subsided to an amazing degree." A few years later, London wrote a short story about a dog named Bâtard who, at the end of the story, kills his master. London sold the piece to Cosmopolitan Magazine, which published it in the June 1902 issue under the title "Diablo – A Dog". London's biographer, Earle Labor, says that London then began work on The Call of the Wild to "redeem the species" from his dark characterization of dogs in "Bâtard". Expecting to write a short story, London explains: "I meant it to be a companion to my other dog story 'Bâtard' ... but it got away from me, and instead of 4,000 words it ran 32,000 before I could call a halt."
Written as a frontier story about the gold rush, The Call of the Wild was meant for the pulp market. It was first published in five installments in The Saturday Evening Post, which bought it for $750 in 1903 (~$ in ). In the same year, London sold all rights to the story to Macmillan, which published it in book format. The book has never been out of print since that time.
Editions The first edition, by Macmillan, released in July 1903, had 10 tipped-in color plates by illustrators Philip R. Goodwin and Charles Livingston Bull, and a color frontispiece by Charles Edward Hooper; it sold for $1.50. It is presently available with the original illustrations at the Internet Archive.
Genre
The Call of the Wild falls into the categories of adventure fiction and what is sometimes referred to as the animal story genre, in which an author attempts to write an animal protagonist without resorting to anthropomorphism. At the time, London was criticized for attributing "unnatural" human thoughts and insights to a dog, so much so that he was accused of being a nature faker. London himself dismissed these criticisms as "homocentric" and "amateur"."London Answers Roosevelt; Revives the Nature Faker Dispute – Calls President an Amateur" London further responded that he had set out to portray nature more accurately than his predecessors.
Along with his contemporaries Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, London was influenced by the naturalism of European writers such as Émile Zola, in which themes such as heredity versus environment were explored. London's use of the genre gave it a new vibrancy, according to scholar Richard Lehan.