for, although the turn-of-the-century marketplace had been
flooded with back-to-nature literature, critics saw something
extraordinary in London's novel. "In these days of the
development of 'laureates of nature' and biographers of field
and forest folk,--who are producing volume upon volume of
what in years past would have been dull 'natural history'
books, appealing only to the few,--it is hard to find a new key
in which to sound the praises of nature and animal life. This
Jack London has done," wrote an anonymous reviewer in
Literary World. "If you like dogs, you will like this book. If
you wish to know more of the incident and life of the Alaskan
trails, you will find here a fund of first-hand information, and
withal a story of the first rank as to its conception and
purport."

Another anonymous critic, writing for the San Francisco
Chronicle, was even more enthusiastic:

Compared with [ The Call of the Wild] all other stories or sketches of
this second great gold rush of the nineteenth century pale into
insignificance. Fierce, brutal, splashed with blood, and live with the
crack of whip and blow of club, it is yet a story that sounds the deep
note of tenderness between man and beast, and that loyalty and
fidelity which never falters even in the jaws of death. And beyond all
this is the strange haunting charm of "the call of the wild" to the
savage strain in the big dog, arousing dormant instincts that have
come down to him from his wolf ancestors. . . . It would be idle to
recommend this book to any one who wishes love or sentiment. It is a
man's book, through and through, but any one fond of dogs or of life
and adventure in the Far North will be glad to read the book, and to
read it more than once. In nothing else that Jack London has written
has he shown so clearly as in this his complete mastery of his material
and that unconscious molding of style to thought which marks real
from make-believe literature.

Kate B. Stillé, writing for the Book News Monthly,
perceived something in The Call of the Wild that made it
considerably more than "a man's book" for those fond of dogs
or of "life and adventure in the Far North":

The telling thing in the book is its deep underlying truth. The call of
the wild is no fiction. The things pointed out are the nameless things

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