James Oliver Curwood: Twenty-Two Novels of the Wild North

Curwood was, for a stretch of the 1920s, one of the best-selling authors in America, and he is now one of the most completely forgotten. His novels are set almost entirely in the Canadian and Alaskan wilderness he genuinely explored as a conservationist, and his real innovation was giving animals — wolves, bears, and above all sled dogs like Kazan and Baree — the same interior psychological life his human characters got.

It’s a different register of adventure fiction than the Western: less about civilization taming a frontier, more about a frontier that doesn’t care whether it’s tamed at all, and characters, animal and human alike, who survive it by understanding its rules rather than conquering them.

He belongs in the same shelf as Zane Grey and Max Brand, three writers who each decided the American wild needed its own mythology — just further north and colder than either of the other two ever went.

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