The Call of the Wild
Buck, a pampered California dog, is stolen and sold into the Klondike gold rush, where the whip and the cold strip civilization off him layer by layer. London wrote it at twenty-seven from his own Yukon year, and it made him the most famous writer in America. A short, brutal, exhilarating book about what remains when comfort is taken away.
A man in a red sweater teaches Buck to submit with a club in an early chapter, and readers who met the book as children still name that scene as the one that marked them. What follows is dogs against dogs and men against dogs throughout, which one reader sums up as “84 pages of torture” and another as “why couldn’t London have tortured oysters or skunks.” The Native tribe arriving late is “a shoehorned plot device” built on ugly cliché. The one significant woman exists to demonstrate incompetence. And the law-of-club-and-fang philosophy reads on an adult reread as moralising about primitivism.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
