IN THE EARLY twentieth century, American readers went wild for a pair of books by Jack London (1876–1916). First, The Call of the Wild (1903) told the story of Buck, a dog who returns to the ways of his wolf ancestors. Then London published the mirror image of that tale with White Fang (1906), about the journey of a half-wolf, half-dog to a loving human family. If you’ve heard the call of Jack London, sink your teeth into this quiz.
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. London based Buck, the canine hero of The Call of the Wild, on a dog named “Jack” that he had met in the Klondike.
2. The epigraph that London uses to begin The Call of the Wild is a fragment of the Yukon writer Robert Service’s poem, “The Call of the Wild.”
3. While serving time in jail for vagrancy, London developed a personal philosophy that combined individualism and socialism.
4. After making a small fortune as a gold prospector, London spent the last twenty years of his life writing in Alaska.
5. London’s “To Build a Fire” was a popular how-to book about wilderness survival.
ANSWERS
1. True. Other characters were based on dogs that London had read about in the Reverend Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland.
2. False. These four lines—“Old longings nomadic leap, / Chafing at custom’s chain; / Again from its brumal sleep / Wakens the ferine strain”—come from John M. O’Hara’s poem “Atavism.” As a biological term, “atavism” refers to the reappearance of an ancestral trait that had disappeared from a line of organisms.
3. True. In 1894, London spent a month mulling over the writings of Marx and Nietzsche in New York’s Erie County Penitentiary. He was arrested after he abandoned a protest march of unemployed men, called “Coxey’s Army.”
4. False. London went north in search of gold in the Klondike (in the Yukon Territory) in 1897, but he stayed for only one year. Like most, he never struck it rich.
5. False. “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of London’s most famous short stories, about a man and a dog traveling on the Yukon Trail in extreme cold.