IntroductionJack London had already established himself as a popular writer when his short story "To Build a Fire" appeared in Century Magazine in 1908. This story of the disastrous journey of an unnamed man across the Yukon Territory near Alaska was well received at the time by both readers and literary critics. While London's other works have since been criticized as overly sensational or hastily written, "To Build a Fire" is still considered by many to be an American classic. London based the story on his travels across the harsh, frozen terrains of Alaska and Canada in 1897-98 during the Klondike Gold Rush; he is also said to have relied on information from a book by Jeremiah Lynch called Three Years in the Klondike. Critics praised London's story for its vivid evocation of the Klondike territory. In particular, they focus on the way London uses repetition and precise description to emphasize the brutal coldness and unforgiving landscape of Northland, against which the inexperienced protagonist, accompanied only by a dog, struggles unsuccessfully to save himself from death due to frostbite after a series of misadventures. Involving themes such as fear, death, and the individual versus nature, "To Build a Fire" has been classified as a work of naturalistic fiction in which London depicts humans as subject to the laws of nature and controlled by their environment and their physical conditions. trick. With its short, matter-of-fact sentences, "To Build a Fire" is representative of London's best work, which influenced later writers such as Ernest Hemingway. Part I "To Build a Fire" begins at nine o'clock on a winter morning as an unnamed man travels through the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada. The man is a chechaquo (cheechako), a Chinook slang word meaning "newcomer." This is the man's first winter in the Yukon, but as he is "unimaginative" and therefore unaccustomed to thinking about life and death, he is not afraid of the cold, which he estimates at fifty degrees below zero. He is on his way to join the rest of his companions at an old mining camp on a distant fork of Henderson Creek, and estimates his arrival at six in the evening. The man travels on foot; all he has in the way of supplies is his lunch. It isn't long before he notices that the temperature is below fifty degrees below zero, but this fact still doesn't worry him.