THE CALL OF THE WILD (1900-1916)

When Jack London's The Call of the Wild was published in 1903 it became an immediate best seller. Readers were fascinated by the story of a domesticated dog from California named Buck that became the "primordial beast" in the Klondike, eventually reverting to the wolf. In describing Buck's progress from tameness to wildness, writes, Roderick Nash, Jack London passed judgment on his contemporaries. "They, too," he implied, "suffered from over-civilization," and in the early 1900's the idea struck a sympathetic chord. For many the growth and change of the United States over the previous hundred years seemed to have brought not the millennium once expected but rather a state of confusion, corruption, and debilitating abundance. For such, Buck's simple, vigorous, unrestrained life in the North was very appealing. As the twentieth century dawned, the nation found itself drawn toward virility, toward novelty, toward nature. The enthusiasm of many Americans for Buck's reversion to the primitive points the way to a general interpretation of American culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Even in the midst of celebrations of progress, moral absolutism, and Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority, the feeling could not be downed that the American culture had seen its greatest moments. This realization, or rather this mood, influenced many aspects of turn of the century thought and behavior. This volume, along with the others in the series, represents a unified effort to restore to historical study the texture of life as it was lived, without sacrificing theoretical rigor or informed scholarship.