Where to Start with Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Martin Eden, or To Build a Fire

Jack London is often filed under books for boys, dogs, and snow. Readers who pick him up as adults expect something brisk and uncomplicated, and the first few pages of The Call of the Wild seem to confirm that. Then the beatings begin, and the sled teams start to die, and the book turns out to be harder and stranger than its reputation.

The other surprise is range. London wrote about the Klondike, but he also wrote Martin Eden, a long novel about a working-class sailor in Oakland who teaches himself to write and discovers what the educated classes think of him. Readers who want the second kind of book may never find it if they stop after the dogs.

This guide covers one short story and three novels, all available free on Project Gutenberg. It describes openings, structure, and what to pay attention to. It does not reveal how any of them ends.

First choice: To Build a Fire

“To Build a Fire” has no standalone eBook on Project Gutenberg. It is the third story in Lost Face, a collection of seven Klondike stories, in a text transcribed from a 1919 Mills and Boon edition.¹ The story opens at nine in the morning on a day that has broken “cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey,” as an unnamed man leaves the main Yukon trail and climbs an earth bank toward a dim side trail, pausing for breath and checking his watch.

Why begin here? It is short enough for a single sitting and contains London’s method in its purest form. The man is given no name and almost no past. What he has is a destination, a dog, a few matches, and an estimate of the temperature that the narrator quietly corrects. The story is built from physical facts: the sound of spit freezing in the air, the time it takes fingers to go numb, the places where a creek runs under the snow. Notice how often the narrator tells you what the man does not know, and how the dog’s instincts are set against the man’s reasoning.

If you read nothing else in Lost Face, the title story is worth a look afterwards for a very different register. It opens with a Polish exile, Subienkow, tied in the snow in Russian America and watching a torture he knows is coming to him next. It is grim, and it is also a story about wit.

Second choice: The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild is a short novel of seven chapters, published in 1903.² It begins with a joke at the expense of its hero: “Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing.” Buck is a large dog living on Judge Miller’s estate in the Santa Clara Valley at the moment when gold has been found in the north and every strong dog with a warm coat has become valuable.

Why second? The seven chapters each have a title and a clear stage, from Buck’s kidnapping and sale through his education under the mail carriers Perrault and Francois, his rivalry with the lead dog Spitz, and the later teams and owners. One chapter per session works well. The narrator moves freely into Buck’s perceptions without pretending he thinks in words, and the pleasure of the book is watching a comfortable animal relearn older rules. Pay attention to the chapter titles; they tell you what kind of lesson is coming.

The violence is not incidental. The second chapter is called “The Law of Club and Fang,” and it means both halves literally.

Third choice: White Fang

White Fang, published in 1906, is London’s companion piece to The Call of the Wild, and it runs the story the other way: a wolf-dog born in the wild who ends up among people.³ It is longer and more elaborately organised, in five parts and twenty-five short chapters. Part One does not include White Fang at all. It follows two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin by dog sled through a frozen forest while a wolf pack trails them and the dogs disappear one by one at night.

Why third? Knowing The Call of the Wild lets you see how deliberately London reversed it. The wild is presented first, through the men’s fear, and only then does the book drop into the pack and begin the cub’s life. White Fang passes through several owners, including Grey Beaver, who is Indigenous, and a man called Beauty Smith, who is not. Each part is a distinct phase and gives a natural stopping point. The book argues openly about heredity and environment, in the vocabulary of 1906, and you can disagree with it while reading.

Fourth choice: Martin Eden

Martin Eden, published in 1909, is the one to read if the Klondike does not interest you.⁴ It has forty-six chapters and opens with a young sailor in rough clothes being let into a spacious hall, stuffing his cap into his pocket, not knowing where to put his hands. He has been invited to dinner by a young man he rescued from a gang of drunken hoodlums on a ferry-boat. The house is the Morse home in Oakland, and the daughter, Ruth, is at university.

Why fourth, and why at all? It is a novel about reading. Martin decides to educate himself, works through grammar, Swinburne, and Herbert Spencer, and begins to write, and the middle of the book is a long account of rejection slips, pawned clothes, and hunger. If you have ever tried to learn something from library books alone, the detail will be familiar. The chapters are short, and the book is best read quickly rather than savoured; its energy is in Martin’s momentum. Watch how Martin’s judgment of the Morses changes as his vocabulary catches up with theirs.

Which one first?

Readers who like the frozen-trail setting may also want the sea and island fiction in Robert Louis Stevenson, and the cold observation of men under pressure in Joseph Conrad. For a broader list of travel and survival fiction, see classic adventure novels.

Content notes

The dog books describe animal cruelty in detail. In The Call of the Wild, Buck is starved in a crate and beaten with a club by a man in a red sweater, dogs fight to the death, and a team is driven until it collapses. In White Fang, the cub is beaten by human owners and later made to fight other dogs for money; several of those fights are narrated in full. Neither book treats this as unusual; the narrator reports it as the ordinary condition of working animals in that place and time.

White Fang refers to Indigenous people as “Indians” and uses “squaw” and “savage” freely. “To Build a Fire” and “Lost Face” include death by freezing and death by violence respectively. Martin Eden includes class contempt expressed in period terms and, late in the book, a suicide.

How to read Jack London on BlueReader

Each of the four books has an EPUB download on its Project Gutenberg page. Save the file, upload it to BlueReader, and once the server has finished processing it the book appears on your bookshelf and remembers your place on whichever device you open it.⁵

Lost Face is a good candidate for reading in pieces: open it, read “To Build a Fire,” and come back to the other six stories when you want them. For the novels, the chapter and part divisions are short enough that a session a day will finish The Call of the Wild in a week.