White Fang

1. When a story is told from an animal's point of view, what can the author show you that a human narrator could not — and what does the author lose?
2. Think of an animal you know well. How much of its behavior do you think comes from what it was born as, and how much from how it has been treated?
3. The novel treats a frozen wilderness almost as a character with its own will. What other stories, films, or games have you encountered where the setting itself acts like an opponent?
4. What does the word 'tame' actually mean? Is a tame animal one that is trained, one that is afraid, one that is fed, or something else entirely?
5. In a place where food is scarce and help is far away, which rules that govern your daily life would stop mattering — and which new ones would take their place?
6. London wrote this book as a mirror image of an earlier novel about a tame dog becoming wild. Before you begin, predict which direction you think is harder to travel, and why.

• Nature versus nurture: watch how often the book credits a character's behavior to its birth and how often to its treatment, and notice when those two explanations disagree.
• The law of the wild: London keeps returning to a brutally simple rule about eating and being eaten, so track every moment a character discovers, obeys, or bends it.
• Cruelty and kindness as forces: pay attention to what each kind of handling actually produces in a living creature, and how long the effects last.
• Adaptation and clay: London repeatedly compares a young creature to soft material being pressed into shape, so notice who is doing the pressing at each stage of the story.
• Power and hierarchy: nearly every group in this book — wolves, sled teams, camps, towns — sorts itself into ranks, and the story is often about what happens at the bottom of one.
• Belonging: keep asking what any character in this book would have to give up in order to be part of something larger than itself.

Jack London (1876-1916) grew up poor in and around Oakland, California, and got most of his education from the public library rather than a classroom. Before he was twenty-one he had worked in a cannery, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, ridden freight trains across the country as a tramp, and spent thirty days in jail for vagrancy. In 1897, at twenty-one, he joined the rush of prospectors heading for the Klondike goldfields and spent a brutal winter on the Yukon River. He came home with no gold, a serious case of scurvy, and a head full of material that would make him one of the most widely read authors in the world. The Call of the Wild made him famous in 1903; White Fang followed in 1906. He wrote more than fifty books in under two decades and died in 1916 at the age of forty.

The Klondike Gold Rush began in 1896, when gold was found near the Yukon River, and by 1898 roughly one hundred thousand people had set out for the goldfields. Fewer than half of them made it. There were no roads, no railways, and no engines that could be trusted in that cold, which meant that everything and everyone moved by dog team — a fact that turned working dogs into some of the most valuable property in the North and gave London the world his novel takes place in. He is also writing inside a literary movement called naturalism, which held that living things are shaped by heredity and environment much the way rocks are shaped by weather, and his fascination with Darwin's ideas about adaptation runs through every chapter. One part of that historical setting needs naming honestly: London's portrayal of the Indigenous people of the Yukon reflects the prejudices common among white writers of his era, and modern readers should read those passages critically rather than as accurate description of the peoples who had lived in that country for thousands of years before any prospector arrived.