Jack London

To Build A Fire is the best known of all London's stories. It tells the story of a new arrival to the Klondike who stubbornly ignores warnings about the folly of traveling alone. He falls through the ice into a creek in seventy-below weather, and his survival depends on being able to build a fire and dry his clothes, which he is unable to do. The famous version of this story was published in 1908. In his tales of the South Seas, Jack London so often employs dark humor and grim irony in order to illuminate the clash of cultures. In “The Whale Tooth,†a white man becomes the victim of his own impulse to proselytize the benighted “heathen†on Melanesia. Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing.