The Call of the Wild | Why The Call of the Wild is One of the Most Popular American Novels in the World
In the following essay the author speculates on why The Call of the Wild is one of the most popular American novels in the world.
Jack London's The Call of the Wild, one of the most widely-read American novels in the world, seems a strange choice for this distinction. The setting is the wilderness of the Klondike region, the protagonist is a dog, and the theme of the novel is devolution of the protagonist. Yet these are the same elements that garnered fame for the novel when it was first published in 1903; and these same elements continue to attract readers almost a century later.
In the late 1800s the Klondike region was swept by a gold rush. Gold had been found in California in 1848, and later in...
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