Call of the Wild

Call of the Wild was written by American author Jack London in 1903. Before writing the novel, London traveled to Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. He stayed in the area for nearly a year working in the mines. His experiences during the Gold Rush inspired Call of the Wild.

While living in the slums of Oakland, London threw himself into writing. He later said, “On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day.” At first, this deluge yielded nothing but back to back rejections. London would save every rejection slip on a spindle in his writing room and soon had a column of paper four feet high. In fact, he collected 664 rejection letters in the first five years of writing. Finally, his book was published and the world got WORD of the cruelty of the Yukon.

The story begins in Santa Clara Valley, but the whole the story takes place primarily in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. The story follows the transformation of a dog named Buck from dog to wolf. At the beginning of the story, Buck is stolen from Judge Miller's home in Santa Clara Valley and sold into service on a sled dog team. During the Gold Rush, dogs were used as a means of transportation and there were not enough dogs to meet the impossibly high demand.

The cruelty shown to the animals in the story was very real. London's motivation to write Call of the Wild was heavily based on the cruelty witnessed during his time in the Yukon. He is quoted as saying, "Men shot them, worked them to death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more,” London he continued, “Some did not bother to shoot them—stripping the saddles off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone—those which did not break—and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.” Though The Call of the Wild is about dogs, this same heartlessness is vividly depicted in the book.