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Call of the Wild Ch 1.Qxd The Call of the Wild Jack London THE EMC MASTERPIECE SERIES Access Editions SERIES EDITOR Robert D. Shepherd EMC/Paradigm Publishing St. Paul, Minnesota Staff Credits: For EMC/Paradigm Publishing, St. Paul, Minnesota Laurie Skiba Eileen Slater Editor Editorial Consultant Shannon O’Donnell Taylor Associate Editor For Penobscot School Publishing, Inc., Danvers, Massachusetts Editorial Design and Production Robert D. Shepherd Charles Q. Bent President, Executive Editor Production Manager Christina Kolb Sara Day Managing Editor Art Director Kim Leahy Beaudet Tatiana Cicuto Editor Compositor Sara Hyry Editor Marilyn Murphy Shepherd Editor Sharon Salinger Copyeditor ISBN 0–8219–1615–7 Copyright © 1998 by EMC Corporation All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be adapted, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec- tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without permis- sion from the publishers. Published by EMC/Paradigm Publishing 875 Montreal Way St. Paul, Minnesota 55102 Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 xxx 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 Table of Contents The Life and Works of Jack London. iv Biographical Time Line. vi Historical Time Line . vii Introduction: Historical Overview . viii List of Characters. x Map and Illustrations . xii Chapter I . Into the Primitive . 1 Chapter II . The Law of Club and Fang . 16 Chapter III . The Dominant Primordial Beast. 29 Chapter IV . Who Has Won to Mastership . 48 Chapter V . The Toil of Trace and Trail . 61 Chapter VI . For the Love of a Man . 81 Chapter VII . The Sounding of the Call . 99 Plot Analysis of The Call of the Wild . 122 Creative Writing Activities . 124 Critical Writing Activities . 125 Projects . 126 Glossary . 128 Handbook of Literary Terms . 135 THE LIFE AND WORKS OF Jack London Jack London (1876-1916). London was born in San Francisco, California, to Flora Wellman Chaney. His father had deserted the family before he was born. When London was nine months old, his mother married John London, a widower with two daughters. Because of the family’s severe poverty, Jack left school at the age of fourteen to work in a cannery, and he experienced the colorful life of the San Francisco waterfront. By the age of sixteen, London had been both an oyster pirate and a member of the San Francisco Bay Jack London Fish Patrol. In 1893, at the age of seventeen, London joined the crew of a sealing schooner called the Sophia Sutherland and traveled on an eight-month expedition as far away as Hawaii, Siberia, and Japan. Based on this experience, London wrote the essay “Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan,” which won a twenty-five-dollar first prize in a San Francisco newspaper contest. After his experience at sea, London worked as a coal heaver in the power plant of Oakland, California, shoveling coal for ten cents an hour. Then he joined “Kelly’s Army,” a group of unemployed men march- ing to Washington to protest poor economic conditions. After leaving Kelly’s Army and serving time in prison for vagrancy, London toured the East Coast and then returned to the West Coast by train, traveling across Canada on a coal car. He earned passage on a ship going from Vancouver to California by stoking coal. On his return to Oakland, London became determined to become a writer; he read voraciously and, at the age of nine- teen, continued his education at Oakland High School. After one semester at the University of California, London joined countless others in the Klondike Gold Rush. He spent a win- ter on Split-Up Island, eight miles from the major community of the Klondike Region, Dawson City. Ill with scurvy, he returned to Oakland and began writing seriously, focusing on his Northland experiences. At the age of twenty-three, London made his literary breakthrough with the story “An Odyssey of the North,” which was published by the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1899. Another notable piece published iv THE CALL OF THE WILD during this time was “To the Man on the Trail,” which appeared in the Overland Monthly. He also published about twenty other stories, essays, and poems. London wrote over two hundred short stories in the next twenty years. During that time he also published twenty novels, more than four hundred nonfiction pieces, and three plays. Despite the extraordinary variety of subjects explored in his work, London’s reputation as a writer was based largely on his works about the great North Country. These works included twenty-eight short stories, four novels, one play, and six nonfiction pieces. London’s writings about the North Country are, by and large, examples of Naturalism, a literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies that saw actions and events as arising inevitably from forces in the environment. London’s most famous novels set in the North are The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). His other novels include The Sea-Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), Martin Eden (1909), John Barleycorn (1913), and Jerry of the Islands (1917). His collections of short stories include Love of Life (1907), Lost Face (1910), and On the Makaloa Mat (1919). Sickness plagued London throughout his thirties. At age thirty-one, he contracted tropical sicknesses in the Solomon Islands. At age thirty-seven, he underwent surgery for appen- dicitis and doctors discovered that his kidneys were diseased. The following year he hoped to report on the Mexican Revolution but was struck with dysentery. Two years later, at forty years of age, Jack London died of heart failure and a possible stroke. Despite this untimely death, London left a wide body of works. The works of Jack London greatly influ- enced many modern writers, including George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway. His works have been translated into over eighty languages and remain extremely popular today. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF JACK LONDON v Biographical Time Line 1876 Jack Griffith Chaney is born in San Francisco, California. His father, William Henry Chaney, deserts the family, but his mother marries a man named John London when Jack is nine months old. 1878 The family moves to Oakland, California, where John runs a grocery store. 1881 The family moves to a farm in Alameda, and Jack starts grade school. 1890 London leaves school to work in a cannery. A few months later he pur- chases a boat and becomes an oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay. 1892 London serves for nearly a year as a deputy fish patrolman in the Fish Patrol of San Francisco Bay. 1893 London sails to Japan and Siberia on a seal-hunting voyage. Based on this experience, he writes a prize-winning essay called “Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan,” published in the San Francisco Morning Call. 1894 London works as a coal-heaver in the power plant of Oakland. He joins a group called “Kelly’s Army,” travels around the Midwest and the East Coast protesting poor economic conditions, and is arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls. 1895 London decides to become a writer and returns to high school in Oakland. 1897 London joins the Gold Rush to the Klondike, where he spends two years. His search for gold is unsuccessful, but the setting inspires many of his most successful novels and stories. 1899 London gets his first literary break: He publishes a story, “An Odyssey of the North,” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. 1900 London publishes a collection of stories, The Son of Wolf. By this time he is a popular and well-paid writer. 1903 London publishes the novel The Call of the Wild, which confirms his sta- tus as a great American writer. He also publishes The People of the Abyss, a book influenced by the theory of Social Darwinism. 1904 London publishes the novel The Sea-Wolf. 1906 London publishes the novel White Fang. 1910 London settles near Glen Ellen, California. He publishes the novel Revolution. 1913 London’s house burns down. 1916 London dies on November 22, at the age of forty. vi THE CALL OF THE WILD Historical Time Line Colorado is admitted to the Union; Lieutenant George Custer and white 1876 soldiers are defeated by the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn. Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president. 1877 James Abram Garfield is elected president. 1880 President Garfield is assassinated. Chester Alan Arthur succeeds as president. 1881 Grover Cleveland is elected president; Alaska becomes a district governed 1884 by the laws of the state of Oregon. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington are admitted to 1889 the Union. The last major military battle between whites and Native Americans—the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee—takes place in South Dakota. Grover Cleveland is elected to a second term as president. 1892 William McKinley is elected president. Gold is discovered in the Klondike 1896 region of Canada. People rush to stake claims in the Klondike. The United States annexes 1897 Hawaii. The Spanish-American War, a conflict between Spain and the United 1898 States, is fought in Cuba and the Philippines. President McKinley is assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt succeeds as 1901 president. Gold is discovered in the Fairbanks region of Alaska. 1902 President Roosevelt is reelected. 1904 William Taft is elected president. 1908 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 1910 (NAACP) is founded. Woodrow Wilson is elected president. The Titanic sinks. 1912 World War I begins. 1914 President Wilson is reelected. 1916 HISTORICAL TIME LINE vii INTRODUCTION Historical Overview The Klondike Gold Rush The Call of the Wild is a novel inspired by Jack London’s experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon Territory of northwest Canada.
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