1876-1916 · American novelist and story writer, author of The Call of the Wild
About Jack London
Jack London (1876–1916) was an American novelist, story writer and journalist from San Francisco and Oakland, California. After a hard youth as a cannery worker, oyster pirate, sailor and tramp, he joined the Klondike gold rush in 1897 and wintered on the upper Yukon, where he contracted scurvy and gathered the material for his northern stories. The Call of the Wild made him famous; White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, Martin Eden and many stories followed before his death at his ranch in Glen Ellen at forty.
“Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.”
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.