The Call of the Wild started as a short story. London began, slowly but surely, to publish. Finally, six months after his trip, The Overland Monthly took the story To The Men On The Trail. The San Francisco Bulletin returned a 4000-word essay about Alaska with the note, "Interest in Alaska has subsided in an amazing degree." But London persisted. When London returned home, he promptly resumed being rejected by editors. At first, publishers didn’t care about the adventures that would form The Call of the Wild. The home was the basis for Judge Miller’s ranch in the book, down to details like the “artesian well” and family involvement in a fruit growers' meeting and an athletic club.
In 1901, London visited the Bond brothers at their ranch in Santa Clara, California, which was owned by their father, Judge Hiram Gilbert Bond. Jack London also modeled the California ranch in The Call of the Wild on the Bond family’s home. He later wrote to Marshall Bond, "Yes, Buck was based on your dog at Dawson." 5. Bernard-Collie mix also named Jack, must have made an impression on London. They owed a cabin near Dawson City and London was their tenant. While in the Yukon, London became friends with the brothers Marshall and Louis Whitford Bond. The Call of the Wild’s narrator Buck was based on a dog named Jack.
Their hearts turned to stone-those which did not break-and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.” Though The Call of the Wild is about dogs, this same heartlessness is vividly depicted in the book. “Some did not bother to shoot them-stripping the saddles off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. “Men shot them, worked them to death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more,” London wrote. In one case, he wrote about “Dead Horse Trail,” a section of a mountain pass littered with the bodies of horses. London, a lifelong animal lover, was appalled by the cruelty he saw amid the gold rush. 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.
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