Classic Jack London – Brown Wolf was first published in Everybody’s Magazine then later released in this collection by editors who felt a great demand for London’s American-pioneer writing style.
Also included are; That Spot, Trust, All Gold Canyon, The Story of Keesh, Nam-Bok the Unveracious, Yellow Handkerchief, Make Westing, The Heathen, The Hobo and the Fairy, Just Meat, and A Nose for the King.
BROWN WOLF (excerpt)
She had delayed, because of the dew-wet grass, in order to put on her overshoes, and when she emerged from the house found her waiting husband absorbed in the wonder of a bursting almond-bud. She sent a questing glance across the tall grass and in and out among the orchard trees.
‘Where’s Wolf?’ she asked.
‘He was here a moment ago.’ Walt Irvine drew himself away with a jerk from the metaphysics and poetry of the organic miracle of blossom, and surveyed the landscape. ‘He was running a rabbit the last I saw of him.’
‘Wolf! Wolf! Here, Wolf!’ she called, as they left the clearing and took the trail that led down through the waxen-belled manzanita jungle to the county road.
Irvine thrust between his lips the little finger of each hand and lent to her efforts a shrill whistling.
She covered her ears hastily and made a wry grimace.
‘My! for a poet, delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can make unlovely noises. My eardrums are pierced. You outwhistle—-‘
‘Orpheus.’
‘I was about to say a street-arab, ‘ she concluded severely.
‘Poesy does not prevent one from being practical–at least it doesn’t prevent me. Mine is no futility of genius that can’t sell gems to the magazines.’
He assumed a mock extravagance, and went on:
‘I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain-meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling brook.’
‘Oh, that all your song-transmutations were as successful!’ she laughed.
‘Name one that wasn’t.’
‘Those two beautiful sonnets that you transmuted into the cow that was accounted the worst milker in the township.’
‘She was beautiful—-‘ he began.
‘But she didn’t give milk, ‘ Madge interrupted.
‘But she was beautiful, now, wasn’t she?’ he insisted.
‘And here’s where beauty and utility fall out, ‘ was her reply. ‘And there’s the Wolf!’…
About Jack London:
Jack London (1876-1916), was an American author and 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. London was self-educated. He taught himself in the public library, mainly just by reading books. In 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel, Martin Eden (1909). Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public, and a strong market for short fiction. In 1900, he made $2, 500 in writing, the equivalent of about $75, 000 today. His career was well under way.
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