Jack London
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Jack London was a writer best-known for his adventure stories, many of them set in the wilds of the cold North or at sea. He also wrote newspaper articles, science fiction, and other generic works. London was a California writer who often included certain information about the state or his own attitudes toward the state in his fiction, and what he wrote said much about the nature of California and the entire West Coast in his day, though often transferred to more wilderness regions of the nation. John London was born in 1876 in San Francisco. The family lived on several farms and ranches in California, and London completed grammar school in 1891 in Oakland. He worked in a cannery for a time, and he later worked with the California Fish Patrol. In 1893 he took a seven-month voyage on the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland, and when he returned he won first prize in a contest for writing the best descriptive article in the San Francisco Morning Call for his "Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan." He finished his high school education in Oakland once more in 1895, and while there he wrote for the student magazine, The High School Aegis. London had a particular image which he nurtured, and it is generally accepted that the image was more than that--it was a reality: Adventurer, revolutionist, voice of the proletariat, a writer of he-man fiction, a true hero. . . an expert on boxing, sailing, bicycling, fishing, and duck hunting--this is the imag
. . .
is return from the Yukon. When his university life ended he was, more than anything else, unhappy and uncertain, and took the steam-laundry job without much delay.
THE CALL OF THE WILD
London uses California in a story such as The Call of the Wild as an example of the civilized world, contrasted with the wilderness in which the hero, in this case the dog Buck, faces the "primordial beast" within each of us that can be evoked given the right circumstances. Buck is a civilized dog who is taken from the home he has known and placed in a deadly, cold, and primitive environment and forced more and more to fend for himself, to defend himself against the encroachments of friend and foe alike, and for whom self-preservation becomes the most important and immediate value. As Buck is transformed from a civilized dog to a wild animal, so would a human being placed in the same situation find that his or her civilized trappings were striped away to reveal the savage living inside the veneer.
The book begins with a poem that sets the stage and defines the theme:
Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom's chain;
Again from its brutal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.
This "ferine strain" is the primordial instinct that lies
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Approximate Word count = 2627
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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