Jack London’s Call of the Wild

On reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild

I first read Jack London’s stories as a young lad in Berkeley, California. I was swept away by heroism, the storylines, and the story of living on the edge of civilization in the great white North. I recently re-read the “Call of the Wild” based in the Yukon region of Canada in the early part of the 20th century. Many of the characters are based on real-life people Jack London had met on his travels through the gold fields of Yukon. Many of the people are rootless white men drawn to the Yukon in search of their fortune. Many of them end up marrying local indigenous women and settling down. I particularly like the stories of the half-Indian half-white men who serve as guides and friends to the white adventure hunters. The stories also of course feature their relationship with their husky dogs who travel with them throughout the unsettled wilderness of the Yukon region.

I first read Jack London's stories when I was traveling with my father and family across the US and Canada in 1967. We came within 90 miles of Alaska hitting the Northwest territories near the old Yukon gold rush communities. I begged my father to drive on to Alaska but he refused. It took me almost 50 years before I finally got to Alaska in 2017.
Of course, reading Jack London’s stories from the point of view of a contemporary progressive writer poses challenges, first and foremost for this reader is the racism, sexism, and colonialist white super-mastic British colonialist attitudes that prevail in both of these works, particularly “Kim”. Bill Maher calls this dilemma, the sin of presentism reading classic works through contemporary biased eyes. The solution is simple, just ignore the abeliasism, classism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and other ableism and just enjoy the story, the characters, the history, and the settings. If you do that you can enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed. Nothing is to be gained by focusing on the attributes of these stories and of course, other stories written in less enlightened times.


“Jack London Jack London 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.

He also wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.”