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This is our American stories, and we tell stories about all kinds of things here on this show.

And we love spending time

on music, arts, and literature. Jack London's most famous works include The Call of the Wild

and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as his short story to build a fire.

Here's Greg Hengler with more on Jack London.

Jack London carved out his own hardscrabble life as a teen. In his free time, he hunkered down at library soaking up novels and travel books. His life as a writer essentially began in 1893. That year he had weathered

a treacherous voyage, one in which a typhoon had nearly taken out London and his crew. The 17-year-old

adventurer had made it home and regaled his mother with his tales of what happened to him.

When she saw an announcement in one of the local newspapers for a writing contest, she pushed her son to write

down and submit his story. Armed with just an eighth grade education, London captured the

$25 first prize, beating out college students from Berkeley and Stanford.

For London, the contest was an eye-opening experience, and he decided to dedicate his life to writing short stories.

But he had trouble finding willing publishers.

In fact, Jack London kept all of his rejection letters from the first five

years of his writing career and impaled each one of them on a spindle. The impaled letters,

600 of them, eventually reached a height of four feet. When White Fang was first published in 1906, Jack London was well in his way to becoming

one of the most famous, popular, and highly paid writers in the world. In fact, London was the

first author in the world to become a millionaire from his writing. He died at his California

ranch on November 22nd, 1916. He was 40 years old.

To build a fire takes place in the snowy world of the Yukon, where it's so cold you spit freezes

before it even hits the ground. After spending a very influential part of his young life mining for gold in the Arctic North,

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