In its unblinking portrayals of nature's unforgiving harshness, of humankind's capacity for both shocking brutality and unconditional love, and of the struggle for survival that is common to all life, White Fang is classic London. Though not considered the literary equal of The Call of the Wild, White Fang was an immediate commercial success and continues to be popular a century after its initial publication. Both novels, along with scores of London's short stories, are set in the land the author called simply 'The North'-the Yukon Territory to which he once traveled as a gold prospector. (London had become, as well, the first millionaire American author.) The two novels are related in that while The Call of the Wild tells the story of a dog who becomes wild and leads a wolf pack, White Fang is the life story of a wolf who comes, after many hardships dealt him by both man and nature, to live a dog's life with a loving master. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box.When White Fang was published in 1906, Jack London was the most widely read writer in the United States and was also popular in Europe, thanks to his second novel, The Call of the Wild (1903). The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. It was made of stout birch bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled that dragged along behind. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapor that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.īut there was life, abroad in the land and defiant. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.

The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light.Ī vast silence reigned over the land.

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.

White fang full book