Novel
White Fang
Jack London · 1906
Opening lines
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In the Canadian Far North, in the days of the gold prospectors, a she-wolf who is half dog and an old one-eyed wolf have a litter of which only one cub survives the famine. The wolf cub learns the law of the Indian camp where his mother is recognised, then passes into the hands of a man who exhibits him and makes him fight for money. Almost everything is told from the animal's side: what it sees, what it smells, and what it does not understand about men.
Context
The novel appeared as a serial in Outing magazine, from May to October 1906, then in volume form from Macmillan, three years after The Call of the Wild, which had made its author famous without making him rich: he had sold all the rights for two thousand dollars. London had spent the winter of 1897-1898 in the Klondike. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt ranked him among the nature fakers, mocking the fight of a bulldog against the wolf-dog; London replied in 1908 that his two dog books protested, on the contrary, against the humanization of animals. The text was long published for young readers, often abridged.
Who it is for
A novel told almost entirely from the point of view of an animal, often published for children in an abridged version. Standard French translation since 1923.
Prizes and reception
An immediate commercial success, adapted for the cinema as early as 1925 and translated into dozens of languages.
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