HURRY How does the historical context of the Alaska gold rush influence
Jack London's The Call of the Wild?

Since Jack London sold the manuscript for The Call of the Wild to MacMillan in 1903, it has never been out of print. The story follows a dog, Buck, as he is taken from a comfortable California life to the cold wilds of the Klondike during the 1896–1899 Gold Rush. London himself made the trek to Alaska as a prospector, but he was one of the many who left without striking it rich. Buck was inspired by the dog of two brothers London befriended while in Alaska. Although London would write other books with canine main characters, such as White Fang, and wrote about other areas than Alaska (including California, Mexico, and Hawaii), he remains most associated with this short novel. It presents vividly and compactly his ideas about relationships between personalities and places, cruelty and bravery, and the spirit of adventure. These ideas mixed London’s own reading of works by John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin, among others. Many of these ideas were circulating among London’s contemporaries including Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, now often referred to as literary Naturalists. All of these writers drew inspiration from the reputation of the American West as a wild setting, but London was the one who would most memorably extend the West’s dynamics of opportunity, risk, and violence up in the Alaskan territories.

d. pushing his plate away from the edge of the table idk what the other guy was trying to