White Fang is a novel by American author Jack London (1876-1916) --- and the name of the book's eponymous character, a wild wolfdog. First serialized in Outing magazine, it was published in 1906. The story takes place in Yukon Territory, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush and details White Fang's journey to domestication. It is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best-known work, The Call of the Wild, which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.
Much of White Fang is written from the viewpoint of the titular canine character, enabling London to explore how animals view their world and how they view humans. White Fang examines the violent world of wild animals and the equally violent world of humans. The book also explores complex themes including morality and redemption.
White Fang has been adapted for the screen numerous times, including a 1991 film starring Ethan Hawke.
Reception
Upon its release, White Fang was an immediate success worldwide. The novel became popular, especially among younger readers. Robert Greenwood called White Fang "one of London's most interesting and ambitious works." Virginia Crane claims that the novel is "generally regarded as artistically inferior to its companion piece The Call of the Wild], but that it] helped establish London as a popular American literary figure."
Shortly after the book's publication, Jack London became a target in what would later be called the nature fakers controversy, a literary debate highlighting the conflict between science and sentiment in popular nature writing. President Theodore Roosevelt, who first spoke out against the "sham naturalists" in 1907, specifically named London as one of the so-called "nature fakers." Citing an example from White Fang, Roosevelt referred to the fight between the bulldog and the wolf "the very sublimity of absurdity." London only responded to the criticism after the controversy had ended. He wrote in an 1908 entitled "The Other Animals"
I have been guilty of writing two animal---two books about dogs. The writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest against the "humanizing" of animals, of which it seemed to me several "animal writers" had been profoundly guilty. Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: "He did not think these things; he merely did them," etc. And I did this repeatedly, to the clogging of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and I did it in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.