In the appropriate chill of the day, it is worth noting that Jack London, a man who knew cold and wrote about it memorably, was born on this date in 1876. London was certainly one of the writers who got me hooked on books as a young reader.
In fact, in the early 20th century, many 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 a half-wolf, half-dog’s journey to a loving human family. If you’ve heard the call of Jack London, howl at this quiz. (Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature)
TRUE or FALSE (Answers below)
1. London based Buck, the canine hero of The Call of the Wild, on a dog named “Jack” that he’d met in the Klondike.
2. The epigraph London uses to begin in The Call of the Wild is a fragment of Yukon writer Robert Service’s poem, “The Call of the Wild.”
3. London developed a personal philosophy that combined individualism and socialism while serving time in jail for vagrancy.
4. London spent the last twenty years of his life writing in Alaska after making a small fortune as a gold prospector.
5. London’s “To Build a Fire” was a popular how-to book about wilderness survival.
Sonoma State University maintains an extensive online collection about London and his work:
http://london.sonoma.edu/
Answers
1. TRUE. Other “characters” were based on dogs London had read about in 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 stayed for 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.
