This collection was originally published in 1980. All Jack London's writings, including those reprinted in this volume, were published in or before 1916.

I found London's writing uneven—not too surprising, since he often stated that he wrote only to produce an income, which means that he was more interested in getting it done in a hurry than reaching any level of perfection. His storytelling, however, makes up for any shortcomings in his writing. This collection of three of his most famous novels and forty of his short stories is representative of his skill in creating page turners that made him the first writer of fiction to make a fortune from his writing.

London enrolled in high school at the age of nineteen, having decided that education must be the key to establishing the kind of prosperous life he envisioned. Prior to this, as a school dropout, he had sampled a broad range of professions that required little to no formal education: working long hours in a cannery, buying a boat with borrowed money to become an oyster pirate, working for the California Fish Patrol after his boat required more repairs than was worthwhile, signing on as a sailor on a commercial voyage to Japan, and finally becoming a hobo. This last occupation earned him 30 days in a Buffalo, New York, jail.

During high school and a short stint as a college student, he did his studying in the familiar environment of a neighborhood saloon. Though his year in the Klondike, at age 21, had failed to yield enough gold to guarantee he would not have to return to low-wage jobs, his experiences during that year became the substance of his fiction that began to yield the wealth that he craved. By 1900, at the age of 24, he had accomplished his goal to make a good living as a writer. With the publication of The Call of the Wild in 1905, he was well on his way to becoming the world's highest paid author.

In The Call of the Wild, a pampered pet must adjust to life in the wild, and in White Fang, London reverses the plot with a wild dog that becomes domesticated. Somehow, the greater hero in my mind is the spoiled Buck, who becomes a master of his adopted wilderness, even though the born-wild White Fang is assigned heroic acts as a defender of his master's household. In both these classic dog tales, London writes in the first person as a dog, convincingly assuming the physical and mental presence of his canine characters. He skillfully invites readers to inhabit these dog bodies, see through their eyes, hunger when they hunger, feast when they end a hunt with a successful kill, and puzzle through the expectations of the humans whom they encounter.

London's duet of dog stories is suitable for children of any age, as well as an exciting read for their elders. The same can't be said of The Sea-Wolf. Though there is action enough in this tale of life at sea to earn the label of adventure tale, it is as much a psychological thriller. As I read, I found myself envisioning it as a 1950s technicolor movie, along the lines of Treasure Island or The Buccaneer. And now I learn it was made into a 1941 film with Edward G. Robinson. Both the black-and-white format and the choice of Robinson as the brutal Captain Wolf Larsen suggest that the film is more focused on the psychological aspects of the story.

London's dogs were not great lotharios. Their lives were the lives of great adventurers with little time for romance, but his gentleman protagonist in The Sea-Wolf is human, and like London himself, was in need of female companionship. Thus London provides him with a beautiful, intelligent woman plucked from the sea, whom he courts in proper Victorian fashion.

The short stories are reprints of four collections that London published, plus two more from his extensive Klondike writings that fueled his successful foray into writing for magazines, a format just coming into its own as London's career was taking off. Several of his favorite characters people many of his frozen-north stories, sometimes as a central character, sometimes as a casual drop-in. Some of the stories are little more than character studies or clippings from daily life; others are morality tales, action sequences that culminate in a meaningful end. ( )