The classic story of a remarkable dog. Buck, lives a comfortable life as top dog at the home of the Judge. Son of a handsome St Bernard, Buck too is handsome, intelligent and totally trusted by the household. But everything changes when Buck is stolen from his life of luxury and forced into the harsh labour of a sledge dog in the heart of the icy Yukon Territory. How Buck survives his savage ordeal and responds to the pull of life as a dog living in the wild is a powerful story of the reality of nature which can only partially be trained out of the dog.
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The Call of the Wild is a short experience novel by Jack London, distributed in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when solid sled canines were sought after. The focal character of the novel is a canine named Buck. The story opens at a farm in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is taken from his home and sold into administration as a sled canine in Alaska. He turns out to be logically more crude and wild in the cruel climate, where he is compelled to battle to get by and overwhelm different canines. By and by, he sheds the facade of human advancement, and depends on early stage intuition and learned insight to arise as an innovator in nature.
John Griffith Chaney — aka Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child, London passed his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. His years in the Klondike searching for gold left their mark in his best short stories; among them, The Call of the Wild, and White Fang. His best novel, The Sea-Wolf, was based on his experiences at sea. His work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. He retired to his ranch near Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various diseases and drug treatments.
