The Call of the Wild follows the life of a dog named Buck. The story opens when Buck is stolen from his home in California and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. The Call of the Wild is set in Yukon, Canada during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. Jack London spent almost a year in the Yukon collecting material for The Call of the Wild. The book's great popularity and success made a reputation for London; much of its appeal derives from its simplicity as a tale of survival. As early as 1923, the story was adapted to film, and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations. This edition is limited to 1,000 copies.

Author Biography

John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, (January 12, 1876 - November 22, 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. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction expose The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.