Reception
Upon its release, White Fang was an immediate success worldwide. The novel became popular, especially among younger readers. Robert Greenwood called White Fang “one of London’s most interesting and ambitious works." Virginia Crane claims that the novel is “generally regarded as artistically inferior to its companion piece, but helped establish London as a popular American literary figure."
Shortly after the book's publication, Jack London became a target in what would later be called the nature fakers controversy, a literary debate highlighting the conflict between science and sentiment in popular nature writing. President Theodore Roosevelt, who first spoke out against the "sham naturalists" in 1907, specifically named London as one of the so-called "nature fakers". Citing an example from White Fang, Roosevelt referred to the fight between the bulldog and the wolf "the very sublimity of absurdity." London only responded to the criticism after the controversy had ended. He wrote in an 1908 entitled "The Other Animals":
I have been guilty of writing two animal—two books about dogs. The writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest against the "humanizing" of animals, of which it seemed to me several "animal writers" had been profoundly guilty. Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: "He did not think these things; he merely did them," etc. And I did this repeatedly, to the clogging of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and I did it in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.Read more about this topic: White Fang
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (16671745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (18581915)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, I hear you spoke here tonight. Oh, it was nothing, I replied modestly. Yes, the little old lady nodded, thats what I heard.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)