In these vivid stories, London pits nature at its most extreme against men who must struggle violently to survive. Whether describing ore cables strung across a valley in Sacramento gold-mine territory or the straining boards of ships battered by gales, London's eye for realism keeps his dramatic tales vivid and fresh -- even now, nearly a century after his death.

Author Biography

John Griffith "Jack" London (1876 - 1916) was an American novelist, journalist and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North" and "Love of Life." He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen," and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.