Klondike Tales

As a young man in the summer of 1897, Jack London joined the Klondike gold rush. From that seminal experience emerged these gripping, inimitable wilderness tales, which have endured as some of London's best and most defining work. With remarkable insight and unflinching realism, London describes the punishing adversity that awaited men in the brutal, frozen expanses of the Yukon, and the extreme tactics these adventurers and travelers adopted to survive. As Van Wyck Brooks observed, "One felt that the stories had been somehow livedthat they were not merely observedthat the author was not telling tales but telling his life." This edition is unique to the Modern Library, featuring twenty-three carefully chosen stories from London's three collected Northland volumes and his later Klondike tales. It also includes two maps of the region, and notes on the text.

Jack London (1876-1916), by turns a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent, and an avowed socialist, first achieved fame with The Son of the Wolf (1900), a collection of short stories drawn from his experiences in the Klondike gold rush "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived," said Alfred Kazin. <br>