“To Build a Fire” begins at nine o’clock on a winter morning as an unnamed man travels across the Yukon Territory in Northwestern Canada. London died in 1916 at the age of forty from uremia and an overdose of morphine. He was married twice and had two daughters by his first wife.
London became a millionaire as a result of his popularity and his prodigious literary output, which includes more than two hundred short stories, twenty novels, three plays, and numerous nonfiction works. In addition, he worked as a journalist and published his autobiography. London’s straightforward account of the man’s death earned “To Build a Fire” critical acclaim.ĭuring his lifetime, London also wrote novels and stories about his political beliefs and his journeys in the South Seas. In it, a chechaquo (cheechako), or newcomer, ignores the advice of an old-timer and travels in the Klondike with only a dog to accompany him even though the temperature is a lethal seventy-five degrees below zero. In 1908 London published “To Build a Fire,” a story which is now considered a classic. Its companion novel, White Fang, was published in 1906. London received international fame in 1903 with the publication of The Call of the Wild, a novel which is also set in the Klondike territory. London’s readers were captivated by his vivid tales of life in the wilds of Alaska and northwestern Canada, where men and dogs worked with, as well as battled against, each other to survive the harsh and brutally cold environment. This collection of short stories quickly brought him fame. In 1900 London published The Son of the Wolf. When he returned to Oakland, he began his career as an author, selling his first Klondike story, “To the Man on Trail,” in 1898. Although he proved unsuccessful as a miner, his experiences in the grim and frozen North land provided him with a wealth of ideas for fiction. In 1897 London took part in the Klondike Gold Rush in northwestern Canada. The following year he joined the Socialist Labor Party and later briefly attended the University of California, until lack of money forced him to withdraw. London enrolled in Oakland High School at age nineteen and completed his course study within a year. Throughout his early experiences, he read intensively in both literature and philosophy. London traveled across the United States while still in his teens.
#To build a fire dogs perspective series#
London quit school at age fourteen and took a series of jobs along the Oakland waterfront, working in a cannery and as a longshoreman, making money by stealing from the oyster beds in San Francisco Bay, and, later, serving as a seaman on a ship bound for Japan. The family settled in Oakland, California, in 1886. London took his surname from his stepfather, John London, whom his mother married shortly after her son’s birth. Jack London was born in 1876 in San Francisco, California, to Flora Wellman, whose common-law husband left her upon learning that she was pregnant. With its short, matter-of-fact sentences, “To Build a Fire” is representative of London’s best work, which influenced such later writers as Ernest Hemingway. Involving such themes as fear, death, and the individual versus nature, “To Build a Fire” has been categorized as a naturalistic work of fiction in which London depicts human beings as subject to the laws of nature and controlled by their environment and their physical makeup. In particular, they focus on the way in which London uses repetition and precise description to emphasize the brutal coldness and unforgiving landscape of the Northland, against which the inexperienced protagonist, accompanied only by a dog, struggles unsuccessfully to save himself from freezing to death after a series of mishaps. Critics have praised London’s story for its vivid evocation of the Klondike territory. London based the story on his own travels across the harsh, frozen terrain of Alaska and Canada in 1897-98 during the Klondike gold rush he is also said to have relied on information from a book by Jeremiah Lynch entitled Three Years in the Klondike. While other works by London have since been faulted as overly sensational or hastily written, “To Build a Fire” is still regarded by many as an American classic. This tale of an unnamed man’s disastrous trek across the Yukon Territory near Alaska was well received at the time by readers and literary critics alike.
Jack London had already established himself as a popular writer when his story “To Build a Fire” appeared in the Century Magazine in 1908.
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