John Griffith Chaney—generally known by his pen-name of Jack London—was one of the first American writers to capitalize on “commercial” fiction (the way, I suppose, that Dickens had in Victorian England), publishing his stories and serializing novels in American magazines and then in book form, becoming perhaps the first American writer to become a true international celebrity and make a fortune from his writing. As a result, readers often think of him as “just” a popular writer, rather than one with some bona fide literary clout.
This is especially true if you only know him as the author of books like The Call of the Wild—and if your impression of that most famous of his books is as a simple adventure yarn of the Klondike gold rush through the eyes of a sled dog. But to deal with the first misconception, London’s catalogue includes a wide variety of genres. He wrote a dystopian science fiction novel, The Iron Heel (1908), that depicts the rise of a brutal conservative dictatorship designed to prevent a populist socialist movement from gaining political power in the United States. It’s a novel that stands as a precursor to later popular novels like Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the like.
A strong advocate of socialism (like many of his contemporaries), London sought to promote workers’ rights as well as animal rights (he was a strong voice against the inhumane treatment of circus animals at the time), London wrote a powerful first-hand expose of the poor working-class citizens of London’s Whitechapel district, called The People of the Abyss (1903). He lived among the impoverished people of that neighborhood, lodging with a poor family and sleeping on the street or in workhouses. In his acclaimed novel Martin Eden (1909), London presents a working-class protagonist trying to become a writer. It’s a semi-autobiographical Künstlerroman (a novel about the development of a young artist) in which the protagonist works hard at a variety of jobs trying to put some money together but still have time to hone his artistic skill. Unlike his creator, Martin rejects socialism, what he calls “slave morality,” and relies on individualism, in the belief that he can outperform other workers in a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest. In a copy of the book he gave Upton Sinclair, London wrote “One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it.” This latter concept is explored, as well, in The Sea-Wolf (1904), in which a domineering sea captain, Wolf Larsen, is shown as a kind of Darwinian (or Nietschean) survivor able to dominate those around him by his strength and will. He contrasts with the novel’s narrator—the religious idealist Humphrey Van Weyden, and his ship, the Ghost, is the scene of a struggle between Larsen’s materialistic atheism and pragmatic power and Van Weyden’s mild morality. Ambrose Bierce wrote of The Sea-Wolf : “The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen… the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime.”
All of this may be what Chaucer’s Friar would call “a long preamble of a tale,” but my point is that London is a far more complex writer than the image of a “popular writer of animal stories” would imply. Indeed, if you remember The Call of the Wild as a book for kids or a YA audience at best, a novel told from the point of view of the animal himself rather than his master, something like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, then you’ve got, as they say, another think coming.
I first read The Call of the Wild in 9th grade in an illustrated edition that had clearly been designed for kids and published by a children’s book publisher (Whitman Publishing, Racine, WI). And though at the time I thought it was the best book I’d ever read, I remember thinking even then that this was not a story intended for children, despite its short length and its “adventure novel” reputation. It was full of the deaths of dogs, and men; full of violence and full of brutality; a sometimes grisly picture of what Tennyson called “nature red in tooth and claw.” Nor was the fact that the narrator and protagonist was a dog presented in a cute or anthropomorphic manner. London tried to truly enter into the consciousness of a dog—his sense impressions, his manner of learning through painful experiences, his instinctive motives and reactions to events around him. Even in his own lifetime he sometimes found himself lumped in with writers who “humanized” animals, but protested that “Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog heroes: ‘He did not think these things; he merely did them,’ etc. …and I did it to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.”
The plot of The Call of the Wild is rather episodic: The story begins at Judge Miller’s home in Santa Clara Valley in California, where Buck, described as a 140-pound mixed Saint Bernard and “Scotch Shepherd” (what we would call a Rough Collie) is a household pet. It is 1897, and the gold strike in the Yukon has created a huge market for large dogs who might be trained to pull sleds, and the judge’s assistant gardener steals Buck one night and sells him to strangers. They put him on a train and ship him to Seattle, where a man in a red sweater ill-treats him and beats him savagely with a club until he is battered into compete obedience, learning the “law of club and fang.”
Buck is sold to two French-Canadian government employees who train him as a sled dog, where he joins a team of ten. Over several weeks, from the other dogs he learns how to be a part of a team, submitting to a vicious lead dog named Spitz, how weak dogs are attacked and killed by the entire pack, and how to survive at night by digging a bed in the snow. Eventually the rivalry between Spitz and Buck erupts into a fight to the death, which Buck wins, taking over as lead dog. Under his leadership the team make a record run along the Yukon trail. But the French Canadians are assigned to other duties, and their team is sold to a “Scotch half-breed” as London calls him, who carries mail but overworks the dogs until some of them die from exhaustion.
The new mail carrier sells what is left of his team to three newcomers from the U.S.—a vain and silly woman called Mercedes, her milquetoast husband Charles, and her domineering brother Hal. They know nothing about how to survive in the Yukon environment, will not take advice from experienced miners, and treat the dogs like unfeeling machinery. Most of the dogs die on the trail. Only Buck and four other dogs are left when they pull into White River, where they meet the experienced driver John Thornton who warns them that the ice is too thin to continue and that their load is too heavy. The group presses on anyway, but Buck, exhausted, starved, and having no faith in his owners’ competence to complete this journey, lies down and refuses to go any farther. Hal beats Buck mercilessly until Thornton stops the beating and removes Buck from the traces. The arrogant Hal presses on with his few dogs, his overloaded sled, and his two hapless companions—and all of them are killed along with the dogs when their weighty sled breaks through the ice and they drown.
Thornton nurses Buck back to health, and the dog repays his kindness by saving him from drowning. When Thornton makes an ill-advised wager that Buck would be able to pull a sled carrying half a ton of flour for 100 yards after first breaking it free of ice, Buck accomplishes the feat purely out of devotion to Thornton.
Buck, however, has been having dreams about living with a primitive “hairy man” sometime in the remote past. London presents this as a kind of racial, or species, memory of an earlier stage of evolution, a picture of a younger and wilder world. He later socializes with a wolf who is part of a pack living close by where Thornton is panning for gold. He feels torn between returning to his ancestral roots and running with the wolves, or staying with Thornton whom he has grown to love. The call of his instinctual nature—the call of the wild to run with the wolves—is almost irresistible, but I won’t reveal the climax of the novel (no spoilers!). Eventually, however, Buck does answer the call, and there is a legend in the north of a “Ghost Dog,” larger and stronger than any wolf, who runs at the front of his fellows, singing “a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.”
The movement of the novel makes it a kind of Bildungsroman, a story of the maturation of the hero, who learns as he adapts to the world he finds himself in. But that is only the first part of the story. The rest, as critic Earle Labor as pointed out, follows the traditional hero myth: As in the archetypal hero journey, Buck is first initiated into the harsh world of violence where he struggles for survival. When he matures and becomes the hero, he is leader of his pack. Eventually he undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth, so that he achieves a kind of rebirth and apotheosis as leader of the wolf pack.
London had dropped out of college at Berkeley in 1897 and spent about a year in the Klondike during the gold rush. He used his experiences there to complement his naturalist literary outlook—influenced, like his contemporaries Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, by Emile Zola and French naturalism, applying Darwinian science to the contemporary human condition. The importance of heredity and environment in the creation of character, and, for London, the law of the “survival of the fittest” were applied to human society or, in The Call of the Wild, that natural world into which human beings—or their “civilized” pets—intrude themselves and must adapt to the more primitive environment.
This novel made London’s reputation, and made him the most commercially successful writer of his time. The novel has been continually popular and never been out of print since its 1903 publication. In 1998, Modern Library named it as one of its 100 Greatest English Language Novels of the twentieth century. Later it was named on the Guardian list of the 100 greatest English language novels, and the Observer put it on its list of the 100 greatest world novels. Penguin readers voted it one of their 100 favorite novels, and I have now honored it as book number 58 on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
There have been at least eleven film or television adaptations of London’s classic, the first a silent film by Hal Roach made in 1923. The best-known version has probably been the 1935 adaptation starring Clark Gable (as John Thornton) and Loretta Young. The most recent version, from 2020, starred Harrison Ford as Thornton, and used computer generated motion-capture effects for Buck the dog. None of these adaptations is very true to the book, and the violence is toned down, essentially to make the novel conform to the popular “animal story” image of the book. And all of the films are human-oriented, making Buck nothing more than window-dressing in his own story. So if you want the real Call of the Wild, you need to read the book. There is no substitute.