‘The Call of the Wild’ (1903) is generally considered London’s best work. London himself was a wild man: drunk heavily, whored, jailed, tramped, poached, prospected – the bastard son of a wandering Irish astrologer. The novel is London’s reconciliation with his own feral nature – he eventually killed himself in 1916 with an overdose of morphine – but not before he produced a prodigious amount of work becoming one of the most popular authors of his age. His work is at its best seen as the conflict between animal instinct and intellectual reason, what feels right vs what you know is right.
Rating: 5 / 5