The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild a short adventure novel about a sled dog named Buck (a cross between a St Bernard and a Scotch collie) will be one of the strangest and most strangely potent narratives in this series. Its author was a one-off too. Jack London was a maverick macho young man the son of an itinerant astrologer and a spiritualist mother. As a boy he led a criminal life specialising in the piracy of oysters in San Francisco Bay. As a writer he blazed briefly lived hard and dangerously and died from drink and drugs aged just 40 having written more than 50 books in 20 years. London is the archetype of the American writer as primeval hero the forerunner of Hemingway Dos Passos Kerouac and possibly Hunter S Thompson. To George Orwell he was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been. A devotee of Kiplings Jungle Book London found his literary voice writing about a dog that learns to live at the limit of civilisation. He was inspired to embark on his dog story as a means to explore what he saw as the essence of human nature in response to a wave of calls to American youth urging a new start for the turn-of-the-century generation. Londons mythical creature became his answer to the complex challenges of modernity.