Novels & Stories

New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982. Hardcover. Fine. Still in original unopened plastic shrink wrap. As new. Hardcover black octavo. 1020 pages; 21 cm. Series: The Library of America;; 6; Contents: The call of the wild -- Into the primitive -- The law of club and fang -- The dominant primordial beast -- Who has won to mastership -- The toil of trace and trail -- For the love of a man -- The sounding of the call -- White Fang -- The trail of the meat -- The she-wolf -- The hunger cry -- The battle of the fangs -- The lair -- The gray cub -- The wall of the world -- The law of meat -- The makers of fire -- The bondage -- The outcast -- The trail of the gods -- The covenant -- The famine -- The enemy of his kind -- The mad god -- The teign of hate -- The clinging death -- The indomitable -- The love-master -- The long trail -- The southland -- The god's domain -- The call of kind -- The sleeping wolf -- Selected Klondike short stories -- To the man on trail -- The white silence -- In a far country -- The wisdom of the trail -- An odyssey of the north -- The law of life -- The God of his fathers -- Bâtard -- The league of the old men -- Love of life -- The wit of Porportuk -- To build a fire -- The sea-wolf -- Selected short stories -- All gold canyon -- The apostate -- South of the slot -- The chinago -- A piece of steak -- Mauki -- Koolau the leper -- The strength of the strong -- War -- The Mexican -- Told in the drooling ward -- The water baby -- The red one. Abstract: This Library of America volume of Jack London's best-known work is filled with thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often works itself out through violence. London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time (which included the depressions of the 1890s and the beginnings of World War One), and he remains one of the most widely read of all American writers. The Call of the Wild (1903), perhaps the best novel ever written about animals, traces a dog's sudden entry into the wild and the education necessary for his survival in the ways of the wolf pack. Like many of London's stories, this one is inspired by the early deprivations of his own pathetically short life: the primitive conditions of life as an oyster pirate in San Francisco; the restless existence of a hobo; the isolation of a prison inmate; the exertion of a laborer in the Oakland slums; and the frustration of a failed prospector for gold in the Alaskan Klondike. White Fang (1906), in which a wolf-dog becomes domesticated out of love for a man, is apparently the reverse side of the process found in The Call of the Wild, yet for many readers its moments of greatest authenticity are those which suggest that, in actual practice, civilization is pretty much a dog's life for everyone, of "hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony." Though London was a reader of Marx and Nietzsche and an avowed socialist, he doubted that socialism could ever be put into practice and was convinced of the necessity for a brutal individualism. He thought of The Sea-Wolf (1904), the story of Wolf Larsen and his crew of outcasts on the lawless Alaskan seas, as "an attack upon the superman philosophy," but the Captain is far more memorable than any of the book's civilized characters. London is an immensely exciting writer partly because the conflicts in his thinking tend to enhance rather than hinder the romantic and thrilling turns of his plots. The stories of the Klondike, which are based on his personal experiences and the stories of California, Mexico, and the South Seas, span the whole of London's career as a writer. Short stories in English.