English · Intermediate
Read The Call of the Wild in Englishwith every sentence explained
Jack London · 1903
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The Call of the Wild by Jack London was first published in 1903. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 31,700 words.
Stolen from a sunny home. Thrown into the frozen North. Only the strong survive.
Buck is a big, proud dog, half St. Bernard and half Scotch shepherd, living a comfortable life on Judge Miller's estate in sunny California. But it is 1897, gold has been found in the Klondike, and men are desperate for strong dogs to pull their sleds.
Stolen by a gardener to pay a gambling debt, Buck is beaten, sold and shipped north to the snowbound Yukon. There he must learn a brutal new law — the law of club and fang — while facing the savage hostility of Spitz, the cunning lead dog. And deep inside him, something ancient begins to wake.
Short, fierce and thrilling, Jack London's 1903 novel is one of the best-loved animal stories ever written.
- Author
- Jack London
- First published
- 1903
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Young Adult
- Length
- About 31,700 words
How it opens
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.
Reading The Call of the Wild in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
