The Call of the Wild
1903
This is a book that sears itself into your nervous system. Buck, a magnificent half-breed dog stolen from a California estate, is thrust into the frozen hell of the Klondike Gold Rush where he must become a killer or die. London writes with the intensity of a man who lived this story, who knows what it means to be hungry, to be cold, to feel the ancient part of yourself that civilization was supposed to bury. The narrative builds with the force of natural law: every beaten dog, every frozen mile, every fight for dominance strips away another layer of the civilized veneer until only the primal self remains. By the time Buck answers the call, you will have been taken apart and put back together. The novel's final movement achieves something transcendent, transforming from adventure into myth. This is raw American literature, written in sentences as lean and dangerous as the wilderness it describes.
Editions
X-Ray
“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.””
— Jack London
“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.””
— Jack London
“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.””
— Jack London
“He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.””
— Jack London
“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.””
— Jack London
“Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.””
— Jack London
“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.””
— Jack London
“No, sir. Go to hell sir. It's the best I can do for you sir.””
— Jack London
“He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.””
— Jack London
