The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories Read Online

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

THE CALL OF THE WILD

CHAPTER I - Into the Primitive

CHAPTER II - The Law of Club and Fang

CHAPTER III - The Dominant Primordial Beast

CHAPTER IV - Who Has Won to Mastership

CHAPTER V - The Toil of Trace and Trail

CHAPTER VI - For the Love of a Man

CHAPTER VII - The Sounding of the Call

LOVE OF LIFE

WHITE FANG

PART ONE: THE WILD

PART TWO: BORN OF THE WILD

PART THREE: THE GODS OF THE WILD

PART FOUR: THE SUPERIOR GODS

PART FIVE: THE TAME

A Note on Jack London’s Life and Works

Selected Bibliography

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PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

THE CALL OF THE WILD, WHITE FANG, AND OTHER STORIES

Jack London—his real name was John Griffith London—had a wild and colorful youth on the waterfront of San Francisco, his native city. Born in 1876, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a cannery. By the time he was sixteen he had been both an oyster pirate and a member of the Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay and he later wrote about his experiences in The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). In 1893 he joined a sealing cruise which took him as far as Japan. Returning to the United States, he travelled throughout the country. He was determined to become a writer and read voraciously. After a brief period of study at the University of California he joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897. He returned to San Francisco the following year and wrote about his experiences. His short stories of the Yukon were published in Overland Monthly (1898) and the Atlantic Monthly (1899), and in 1900 his first collection, The Son of the Wolf, appeared, bringing him national fame. In 1902 he went to London, where he studied the slum conditions of the East End. He wrote about his experiences in The People of the Abyss (1903). His life was exciting and eventful. There were sailing voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas. He reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers and gave lecture tours. A prolific writer, he published an enormous number of stories and novels. Besides several collections of short stories, including Love of Life (1907), Lost Face (1910), and On the Makaloa Mat (1919), he wrote many novels, including The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), White Fang (1906), Martin Eden (1909), John Bardeycorn (1913), and Jerry of the Islands (1917). Jack London died in 1916, at his home in California.

Andrew Sinclair has also edited a further collection of stories by Jack London for Penguin Classics, entitled The Sea-Wolf and Other Stories.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923, James Dickey earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Vanderbilt University, graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He began devoting his full time to poetry at the age of thirty-eight. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was twice appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In addition to his many volumes of poetry, he is the author of the novel Deliverance.

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“Bátard” first published in The Faith of Men and Other Stories by
the Macmillan Company 1904
The Call of the Wild first published by the Macmillan Company 1903
“Love of Life” first published in Love of Life and Other Stories by
the Macmillan Company 1907
White Fang first published by the Macmillan Company 1906
Published together in The Penguin American Library 1981
Published in Penguin Classics 1986
Published in Penguin Books 1993

All rights reserved

eISBN : 978-1-101-49564-3

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Introduction

“Primeval” is a word often used to describe Jack London’s work, his attitude toward existence, and his own life. From the beginning of the intensive self-education he undertook early in his adolescence through the end of his life at the age of forty, he prided himself on his “animality,” and identified with his chosen totem beast, the wolf. His gullible friend, the California poet George Sterling, called him Wolf, he referred to his wife as Mate-Woman, named his ill-fated mansion in the Sonoma Valley Wolf House, and created his most memorable human character, Wolf Larsen, in The Sea Wolf. Larsen exemplifies all of the characteristics London admired most: courage, resourcefulness, ruthlessness, and above all, a strength of will that he partly bases on that of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Larsen’s favorite lines from Milton are “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:/Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” a sentiment with which London certainly concurred.

This attitude toward the figure of the wolf—a kind of Presence, an image, a symbolic and very personal representation of a mythologized human being—is pervasive throughout all of London’s Arctic tales and is implied in many of his other fictions. The reader should willingly give himself over to this interpretation of the wolf, and conjure the animal up in the guise of the mysterious, shadowy, and dangerous figment that London imagines it to be. We should encounter the Londonian wolf as we would a spirit symbolic of the deepest forest, the most extremely high and forbidding mountain range, the most desolate snowfield: in short, as the ultimate wild creature, supreme in savagery, mystery, and beauty.

The mythic wolf that London “found” in his single winter spent in the Canadian North during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897—98 and imbued with strangeness and ferocity bears in fact little resemblance to any true wolf ever observed. In studies by biologist Adolph Murie and researchers like L. David Mech and Boyce Rensberger, the wolf emerges as a shy and likable animal with a strong aversion to fighting. There is no evidence that any wild wolf has ever killed a human being in North America. As Rensberger notes, “It has a rather playful, friendly nature among its fellows.