Before You Begin

Before you begin.

A stranger wanders out of the Arctic night into a lone campfire, borrows a pinch of soda and the better half of a tobacco pouch, and calmly insists he killed the last living mammoth with a hand-axe. So opens The Faith of Men — eight tales of the Northland where the only certainties are cold, hunger, gold, and the strange things men will do for all four. Jack London does not give you one story here; he gives you a whole frozen country and turns it loose.

Jack London knew this world from the inside. As a young man he chased the Klondike strike of 1897 up over the passes and down the Yukon, and though he came home with no gold, he came home with the Northland itself — its trails and trading posts, its sled dogs and shamans, its prospectors and native peoples. Out of that hard winter he built the stories that made him one of the most widely read writers in the world, and the reason these tales still grip readers a century on is simple: he wrote what he had seen, and he never flinched from it.

This is a collection, not a single saga, and that is its pleasure. A devil-dog and his devil-master wage a five-year war of pure hatred. Two millionaire partners gamble at dice for the one journey home to a waiting woman. A man hauls a thousand dozen eggs across the ice toward a fortune — or a ruin. A Northland woman loves a white trader so completely that she gives him up. Comedy, tragedy, and stark survival sit side by side, each story its own small world, all of them bound by the same code of the trail.

Turn the page and step into the illustrated gallery that follows — a cast of the collection's most unforgettable figures, the conceptual web of the Klondike world they share, a map of the real Northland where these tales unfold, and full plates of their fiercest moments. The fire is lit. The dogs are circling at the edge of the light. Come in out of the cold.