Jack London published The Call of the Wild in 1903. Buck, a large domestic dog living comfortably on a California estate, is stolen during the Klondike Gold Rush and sold to dog sled teams in the Yukon. Through a series of brutal encounters, with human masters ranging from cruel to decent, with the other sled dogs, with the cold, Buck unlearns his domestic conditioning and progressively reconnects with what the novel calls his primordial self. By the novel's end, having been liberated from human ownership by his final master's death, he runs with a wolf pack and becomes a figure of legend among Indigenous people who encounter him in the wild.
London was engaging with social Darwinism, which was the dominant framework for thinking about competition, survival, and the relationship between civilization and nature in early twentieth-century American popular culture. Buck's arc, from civilized domestic pet to wild ancestral animal, reverses the usual direction of the Darwinian narrative and implies that civilization is a kind of deviation from a more authentic natural condition. London's own politics, he was an active socialist, complicate this reading: his interest in what capitalism and industrialization do to human nature runs through his fiction in ways that the adventure surface does not always make obvious.
The Call of the Wild is written with an economy and directness that London's longer and more discursive novels don't always achieve. Its portrayal of Buck's adaptation, the specific ways he learns to function in a physically brutal environment, the accumulation of experience that changes his psychology, works as a study in how conditions shape behavior that is not entirely undermined by the romantic primitivism the novel also endorses. The novella remains one of the most efficient pieces of American naturalist fiction, covering the territory it intends to cover without unnecessary elaboration.
Treasure Island grew from a map Stevenson drew to entertain his 12-year-old stepson on a rainy afternoon.
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