The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [1]
Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2003 by Tina Gianquitto.
Note on Jack London, The World of Jack London, The Call of the Wild, and White Fang, Inspired by The Call of the Wild and White Fang, and Comments & Questions Copyright @ 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
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The Call of the Wild and White Fang
ISBN 1-59308-200-2
eISBN : 978-1-411-43188-1
LC Control Number 2004100744
Produced and published in conjunction with: Fine Creative Media, Inc. 322 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10001
Michael J. Fine, President & Publisher
Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8642
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FIRST PRINTING
Jack London
John Griffith London was born out of wedlock on January 12,1876, in San Francisco. His mother, Flora Wellman Chaney, a spiritualist and music teacher, married John London later that year. John continually moved the family around California looking for work on farms and ranches, and young Jack was self-sufficient by the time he was fourteen. After working as a newspaper delivery boy, cannery worker, and seaman aboard a sealing vessel, in 1894 he joined Coxey’s Army, a group of jobless men, on a march to Washington, D.C., to protest economic conditions. London abandoned the group along the way and eventually served prison time in northern New York for vagrancy. In prison he reflected on his position at the base of the social pyramid as exploited worker and developed his own branch of Socialism, influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. He joined the Socialist Labor Party and, espousing the idea that education is the route out of exploitation, enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. He dropped out after just one semester but continued to educate himself by reading the fiction of such writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad and the philosophical and political works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and Herbert Spencer.
It is telling that when London joined the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, he packed a copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and John Milton’s Paradise Lost alongside such essentials as bacon and flour. London returned no richer than he was when he left and decided to devote himself to writing. Though London later claimed, “I did not know a soul who had ever published anything... I had no one to give me tips,” in fact he counted among his good friends the poet George Sterling, the writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce, and the editors of the San Francisco Call and the Oakland Times. He began writing newspaper articles on the Russo-Japanese war and the Mexican Revolution, as well as short stories, and within two decades he had published forty-seven books. By 1913 London was the highest-paid writer in the world, and The Call of the Wild and White Fang were enduringly popular with critics and the public. Both stories draw heavily from London’s Yukon experience and exhibit the influence of Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest; both also show London’s avoidance of sentimentality and his commitment to presenting injustice and brutality. London married Bess Maddern, whom he claimed to have chosen for mating possibilities, not for love, in 1900. The couple had two daughters, Joan and Bess, and soon divorced. In 1905 London married Charmian Kittredge, his so-called “Mate Woman,” with whom he shared many of his adventures and who was the model for many of his female characters. Jack London died of uremia and renal colic in 1916.
The World of Jack London,
The Call of the Wild, and White Fang
1876 John Griffith London is born January 12 in