A Study Guide for Jack London's "The Law of Life"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Jack London's "The Law of Life," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535837866

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The Law of Life

Jack London

1901

Introduction

The Law of Life is a short story by the American writer Jack London, one of the most famous and most commercially successful fiction writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story was first published in the March 1901 edition of McClure's magazine, an influential monthly that printed serious works of literature as well as investigative journalism and illustrations. The story appeared in book form for the first time in London's third collection, Children of the Frost (1902), and has been reprinted in countless collections of London's work, as well as in multiple author anthologies, in the intervening years, including the Library of America's 1982 collection, Jack London: Novels and Stories.

The Law of Life is set in the Klondike region of Canada's modern Yukon Territory, where London himself and thousands of others went between 1896 and 1899 to look for gold. (Until 1898, the Yukon River region was part of the Northwest Territories.) London set many of his early stories in the Klondike, including the novel that many consider to be his master work, The Call of the Wild (1903). The main character of The Law of Life is Koskoosh, an elderly former chief of an Inuit tribe. As the story begins, Koskoosh sits alone in the frozen winter with a small fire, listening to his tribe packing up their camp and preparing to move to a place where there might be more food. Koskoosh, weak and blind, waits for the fire to go out and for death to slowly take him. He knows that he can no longer contribute to his tribe, and he accepts his isolation and death as the natural way of things.

Author Biography

London was born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. Many critics believe that his father was William Henry Chaney, but London never knew for sure, and the two only met on one occasion. His mother, Flora Wellman, married John London the year her son was born, and the writer later took his stepfather's last name. During his own lifetime, London was as well known for his adventurous life as for his writing. In his teens, he did odd jobs and factory work, bought his own small boat, and found work stealing