To Build a Fire and Other Stories [Paperback]

To Build A Fire and Other Storiesis the most comprehensive and wide-ranging collection of Jack London's short stories available in paperback. This superb volume brings together twenty-five of London's finest, including a dozen of his great Klondike stories, vivid tales of the Far North were rugged individuals, such as theMalemute Kidface the violence of man and nature during the Gold Rush Days. Also included are short masterpieces from his later writing, plus six stories unavailable in any other paperback edition.

Here, along with London's famous wilderness adventures and fireband desperadoes, are portraits of the working man, the immigrant, and the exotic outcast: characters representing the entire span of the author's prolific imaginative career, in tales that have been acclaimed throughout the world as some of the most thrilling short stories ever written.

Jack London (1876-1916), by turns a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent, and an avowed socialist, first achieved fame withThe 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.TO BUILD A FIRE
 
DAY HAD broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and hel˜