The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, is one of America’s best-known novels. In his Reader’s Companion to this new edition, Daniel Dyer provides a wealth of annotations explaining the book’s many “sourdough” expressions and geographical references in order to help the modern reader see what London saw. Dyer also identifies characters in the novel – human and canine alike – whom London had known, and he spices his annotations with Northern lore and tales from that astonishing time. Many of the editions of The Call of the Wild currently in print are distortions of the original text: The violence has been modified, the rough language sanitized, the punctuation and spelling modernized. This new edition duplicates the original first book edition, which London himself edited and approved. In writing the novel, Jack London did not venture far from his own experiences in California and the Klondike, and, indeed, each of the fifty place-names in the tale can be pinpointed on the maps that accompany this edition.