To Build a Fire

To Build a Fire

By Jack London

Learning Goals

Identify and enjoy features of classic literature.

Analyze interactions among discourse elements that constitute a genre.

Acquire vocabulary and grammar structures in context.

Develop higher order thinking skills to spot clues, make inferences, think critically and draw conclusions to pose arguments in answer to writing and speaking prompts.

Engage in individual and collaborative group work in integrated language skills.

About the story

It is a short story by Jack London, published in Century Magazine in 1908 and later reprinted in the 1910 collection Lost Face. An earlier draft had been published in 1902 in Youth’s Companion. London’s widely anthologized masterpiece illustrates in graphic terms the futility of human efforts to conquer nature. Set in the Klondike in winter, the story concerns a man who ignores warnings and attempts to travel a great distance in the extreme cold. Although even his dog senses the folly of the journey, the man stubbornly continues to believe in his own infallibility. Source; Britannica Encyclopedia.

To Build a Fire was featured as The Short Story of the Day on Wed, Jan 12, 2022

Featured in the collection of Short Stories for Middle School I and Dog Stories.

Source

The Author

Jack London (Jan 12, 1876 - Nov 22, 1916) was an American author best known for writing The Call of the Wild. Jack London was his pen name, likely born in San Francisco, California as John Griffith Chaney. Like the restive characters in his works, London sought a variety of experiences as a young man including sailor, hobo and an agitator for jobs during the depression. He also wrote some of the earliest Dystopian Fiction, including The Iron Heel which portrays America under tyrannical rule, written ten years before the Bolsheviks took over Russia.
During his vagrant period, he spent thirty days in the Erie County jail in New York.

London became a well-known writer and was one of the first to achieve true financial success from his writings. His success brought controversy as well. He was prodigious writer producing over 500 works and was often accused of plagiarism. The manner in which he chose to work contributed to those accusations; he bought plots for stories and novels from a young Sinclair Lewis and he used incidents read in newspapers as material for his stories.
London's most famous short story, particularly popular in both middle- and high school language arts classes, is To Build a Fire. His best-selling book during his lifetime was his 1910 novel Burning Daylight.

The Story

Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, 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 he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky- line and dip immediately from view.
The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed. North and south, as far as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hair-line that curved and twisted from around the spruce- covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island. This dark hair-line was the trail--the main trail--that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.