Jack London gained his first and most lasting fame as the author of tales of the Klondike gold rush. Son of the Wolf is his first collection of stories drawing on his experience in the Yukon. The stories included tell of gambles won and lost, of endurance and sacrifice, and often turn on the qualities of exceptional women and on the relations between the white adventurers and the native tribes.

Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1921) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.