The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. CliffsNotes on Call of the Wild & White Fang covers not one, but two of Jack London’s best known adventures. Meet an amazing dog named Buck and his human friend John Thornton in Call of the Wild, and then follow the story of two men, Henry and Bill, and the life of an unforgettable wolf cub. This study guide will help you keep up with all of the action as you contemplate the characters and their motivations. Helpful background information about the author brings these novels into context for even greater understanding. Other features that help you study include Complete character lists Character analyses of major players Critical essays Review questions Classic literature or modern modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

After a ferry accident on San Francisco Bay, literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden is swept out to sea only to be rescued by the seal-hunting schooner Ghost. Wolf Larsen, the captain of the Ghost, is brutal and cynical but also highly intelligent, and he has no intention of returning Van Weyden to shore. Van Weyden is forced to serve on the Ghost, leaving behind his comfortable world ashore and entering into a psychological battle with Larsen on the sea. Jack London wrote The Sea-Wolf in 1904 following the success of his previous novel The Call of the Wild, and it has gone on to become one of his most popular novels. London actually served on a sealing schooner during his early career and that experience lends a gritty realism to his depiction of life at sea. The book can be read as a psychological thriller and adventure novel, but can also be read as a criticism of Nietzsche’s Übermensch philosophy with Wolf Larsen embodying a “superman” lacking conventional morality.

Conrad Richter, one of American literature's preeminent authors on the American frontier, highlights family hardship, individual suffering, and societal breakup in The Light in the Forest. Impeccably researched, Richter's novel takes place at a time of rapid change in the 18th century. True Son/Johnny is the protagonist, a white boy captured at the age of 4 by the Lenni Lenape Indians and later adopted as one of their own. Forced to return to his white family 11 years later, True Son/Johnny must address what it means to belong and face the consequence of defying those ties.

An adventurous story of a frontier boy raised by Indians, The Light in the Forest is a beloved American classic. When John Cameron Butler was a child, he was captured in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted by the great warrrior Cuyloga. Renamed True Son, he came to think of himself as fully Indian. But eleven years later his tribe, the Lenni Lenape, has signed a treaty with the white men and agreed to return their captives, including fifteen-year-old True Son. Now he must go back to the family he has forgotten, whose language is no longer his, and whose ways of dress and behavior are as strange to him as the ways of the forest are to them.

"A Piece of Steak" was a short story written by Jack London which first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1909. It took him about half a month to write it and earned him five hundred dollars.

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.