The Call of the Wild

Buck, a big, proud dog, half St Bernard and half shepherd dog, lives a comfortable life on a judge's estate in California, until the Klondike gold rush of 1897 creates a huge demand for strong sled dogs. A gardener's helper steals and sells him to pay gambling debts, and Buck is shipped north, where he learns 'the law of club and fang' in the frozen Yukon. He fights the lead dog Spitz for mastery of the team, pulls the mail across the snow, and finds love for one man, John Thornton, while something ancient in him answers the howling of the wolves in the forest.

Jack London had gone to the Klondike himself in 1897, and he published this short novel in 1903, when he was twenty-seven; it made him famous. It is told almost entirely from the dog's point of view, and it can be read in an afternoon. Its mirror image, about a wolf dog who comes in from the wild, is White Fang.

Jack London (1876–1916) grew up poor in San Francisco and Oakland and lived a life as wild as his books: an oyster pirate at fifteen, a sailor on a sealing ship to Japan, a tramp, a socialist agitator and a gold seeker in the Klondike in 1897, where he caught scurvy and gathered material for a lifetime.

The Call of the Wild made him famous in 1903, and he became one of the best-paid writers of his day, producing White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden among more than fifty books. He died on his California ranch at forty.