Jack London, age 9, with his dog Rollo in 1885. The Call of the Wild alludes to the animal cruelty Jack London witnessed in the Klondike. He was as penniless as the day he left, but he had a wealth of new material for a novel. He rafted 2000 miles down the Yukon River then hired himself on boats to get back to San Francisco. Then, after almost a year of eating nothing but beans, bread, and bacon, he contracted scurvy and decided to return to California. He suffered through an Yukon winter reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Darwin’s The Origin of Species-both influences on The Call of the Wild. In 1897, he staked eight claims along the Stewart River, but they yielded little gold. Jack London went to the Klondike Gold Rush to escape poverty.īy age 21, London had yet to publish and was running out of money, so he joined the thousands of people going to the Klondike Gold Rush. In fact, he amassed 664 rejection letters in the first five years of writing.

London would impale every rejection slip on a spindle in his writing room and soon had a column of paper four feet high. At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat.” At first, this deluge yielded nothing but rejection. He later said, “On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for 15 hours a day. Before writing The Call of the Wild, Jack London was rejected 664 times.Īs a young man in the slums of Oakland, California, London threw himself into writing. Here are a few more facts about this 1903 bestseller. The novel was one of the most popular books of the 20th century and made London the highest-paid writer of his time.

The book follows a dog named Buck who’s forced from his cushy life in California to the Klondike Gold Rush, where he adapts and begins to thrive despite cruel conditions. The Call of the Wild catapulted author Jack London to literary fame.

Call of the wild jack