Jack London for the CSET English and CSET Multiple Subject

If you are studying for the CSET Multiple Subject or the CSET English then you should know about Jack London. There will be no practice test in this lesson. We will review important details about Jack London’s life, watch two videos, and conclude the lesson with the entire story of To Build a Fire. As usual, keep in mind that by clicking on the Print this Article link starting on page 2, you may find the long scrolling format easier to study from.

Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and over fifty other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a huge financial success from writing.

To Build a Fire is the best known of all his stories. It tells the story of a new arrival to the Klondike who stubbornly ignores warnings about the folly of travelling alone. He falls through the ice into a creek in fifty-below weather, and his survival depends on being able to build a fire and dry his clothes, which he is unable to do.

Jack London published The Call of the Wild and White Fang after a new kind of animal story had become wildly popular. Most of the authors of such tales (Anna Sewell and Ernest Thompson Seton, for example) wrote with the specific goal of increasing public awareness of wild and domesticated animals and often represented the animal’s point of view, sometimes in the first person. Some, like Thompson Seton, purported to describe the natural world and the consciousness of animals with a high degree of scientific accuracy. Others, like Sewell, used anthropomorphism unapologetically—to enhance the reader’s identification with their animal protagonists.

In 1903—the same year in which Jack London published The Call of the Wild—John Burroughs, the renowned naturalist, attacked popular nature writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long, whom he called “nature fakers” for portraying animals in what he claimed was a sentimental and anthropomorphic fashion. Some critics dubbed London’s animal heroes “men in fur.”

Responding to the charge of being a “nature faker,” London maintained that his own animal stories in fact represented

…a protest against the “humanizing” of animals, of which it seemed to me several “animal writers” had been profoundly guilty…I did it in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research.

In response to the accusations of Burroughs and Roosevelt, London wrote the essay The Other

Animals which is included below.

In The Call of the Wild, Buck’s thought processes are more human than dog-like, but that only