White Fang. Джек Лондон

was accused of plagiarism by another writer, named Egerton R. Young who had published a book titled My Dogs in the Northland in 1902. London acknowledged that he had used Young’s book as a point of reference for his research, but had not taken anything from the story. He also claimed to have written to Young by way of thanks, but Young wrote to the New York Times in 1907 stating that he had never received a letter from London. Factually, the stories are quite different from one another, even though they are both played out in the same region and involve dog sleds. One major difference is that Young’s story is told in the first person from the point of view of a human.

      The Call of the Wild has been adapted into various films and television series – it is a tale that translates so well to different media because it is both straightforward and emotive. The audience can easily tell who the good people are and who London intends for us to view as bad people, and the story is imbued throughout with pathos. After experiencing genuine kindness from John Thornton and then losing him, Buck returns to the wild and London’s message seems to be that love, warmth and contentment should be appreciated as it is often short-lived. He also shows that the struggle for survival is instinctual – as the story draws to an end, Buck has recovered his ancestral, primitive behaviour and fully detached himself from the civilized world that he knew.

       White Fang

      First serialized in an American magazine and then published in 1906, the novel White Fang focuses on the domestication of a wild beast, a plotline which reverses the theme of Jack London’s previous book, The Call of the Wild (1903). Set during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, one of the story’s strengths is the author’s ability to capture the brutal reality of survival in the wilds of the Yukon, Canada.

      The eponymous main ‘character’ is part wolf, part dog, and he eventually finds himself living among humans where his lot is only marginally better than in the harsh wilderness. A sense of alienation surrounds White Fang, who is persecuted by wolves for being part dog and then by dogs for being part wolf. He becomes so toughened by the hostility of the world around him that he transforms into a vicious killer, an inevitable consequence of his instinct to survive.

      Jack London anthropomorphized White Fang and the other animal characters – giving them human personality traits and voices – so that he could reflect on society and its failures without being overly moralistic, which would have been a natural consequence of using human, rather than animal, characters. Its social commentary aside, White Fang remains a well-loved tale, comprising many twists and turns, highs and lows, friends and foes.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

History of Collins

Life & Times

Part One

Chapter 1: The Trail of the Meat

Chapter 2: The She-Wolf

Chapter 3: The Hunger Cry

Part Two

Chapter 1: The Battle of the Fangs

Chapter 2: The Lair

Chapter 3: The Grey Cub

Chapter 4: The Wall of the World

       Chapter 5: The Law of Meat

       Part Three

       Chapter 1: The Makers of Fire

       Chapter 2: The Bondage

       Chapter 3: The Outcast

       Chapter 4: The Trail of the Gods

       Chapter 5: The Covenant

       Chapter 6: The Famine

       Part Four

       Chapter 1: The Enemy of His Kind

       Chapter 2: The Mad God

       Chapter 3: The Reign of Hate

       Chapter 4: The Clinging Death

       Chapter 5: The Indomitable

       Chapter 6: The Love-Master

       Part Five

       Chapter 1: The Long Trail

       Chapter 2: The Southland

       Chapter 3: The God’s Domain

       Chapter 4: The Call of Kind

       Chapter 5: The Sleeping Wolf

       CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

       About the Publisher

PART ONE

       CHAPTER 1

       The Trail of the Meat

      Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they