15 August 2010
Johann Hari has a review of a new biography of Jack London in Slate.
London may be my favorite writer. His prose style is terse, yet evocative (and can’t be easily parodied like that of his imitator Hemingway), and unlike many of his nineteenth-century predecessors remains accessible and readable today. Yet he was an enormously complex, and in some respects despicable, human being.
One of the reasons I may like London so much is that, unlike most kids, I was not assigned his works in middle or high school. (I read the short story “To Build a Fire” in school,” that’s all.) I discovered his work as an adult. I object to the characterization of his most famous work, The Call of the Wild, as “a dog story.” Yes, many consider it that, probably because they last read it in eighth grade, at an age where they could not truly appreciate its themes. But calling it “a dog story” is like calling Huckleberry Finn “a boy’s adventure novel.” It is a complex tale that highlights how thin the veneer of civilization is in us all. And the prose is just glorious to read. I’m all for exposing children to great literature at a young age, but in so doing we should be careful not to pigeonhole those works as children’s literature.
