The adventures of an unusual dog, part St. Bernard, part Scotch shepherd, who is forcibly taken to the Klondike gold fields where he eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack. Buck is a dog born to luxury, but his life changes dramatically when he is sold to be a sled dog in the Yukon Terrority. He earns a reputation for his strength and courage, and is rescued from a series of bad owners by John Thornton, who teaches him to love. When John is...

The two years before he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866) had been bad ones for Dostoyevsky. His wife and brother had died; the magazine he and his brother had started, Epoch, collapsed under its load of debt; and he was threatened with debtor's prison. With an advance that he managed to wangle for an unwritten novel, he fled to Wiesbaden, hoping to win enough at the roulette table to get himself out of debt. Instead, he lost all his money; he had...