Naturalism in The Call of the Wild

Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 to a working class family. He had to deal with a hard life from a very young age, but his constant struggling got him through most of the difficulties and by the age of 30, he was internationally famous for his books Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904) and other successful literay works. Though he wrote passionately about the great questions of life and death and the struggle to survive with dignity and integrity, he also sought peace and quiet inspiration. He wished society to be reformed that he expressed through his writings. His stories of high adventure were based on his own experiences at sea, in the Yukon Territory, and in the fields and factories of California.

Similar to a number of writers at that time, he died young, at the age of 40, impoverished (again), sick and suffering from alcoholism. To this day it is still unclear if he the cause of death was accidental morphine overdose or he commited suicide.

He as well was a fairly controversial person, so that different authors look at him in various ways: ”The basic law of his thinking was logic. His literary style was the clear, obvious and unmistakable sentences of the beautiful English language. ’The Call of the Wild’ serves as the reference book of English stylistics on Sorbonne. He was the man of facts: not to be afraid of looking inside of the eyes of reality, a great view of life. But Jack London's inner debates did not let him to become an even greater writer and thinker.” (Harsányi, 1925)

The novel The Call of the Wild was published in 1903 and is set in Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush. To complete his work, London spent almost a year in Yukon to be familiar with it and to collect material. The story came out in a series in the Saturday Evening Post, and a months later it was released as a