Physical description

Hard cover book. Wild Geese Calling
Author: Stewart Edward White
Publisher: Hodder Stoughton
Date:
Further Information: Brown Cloth hardcover with title lettering to spine in black hand written on a stuck on piece of paper. The spine also has a Library label with an inscription at bottom of spine.

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with the typed text PAT FIC WHI
Paste down front end paper has a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a sticker from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute
Fly paper has stamps from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute and Warrnambool Public Library

Summary

A 1941 Fox film was adapted from White’s 1940 novel, which is set during the Alaska Gold Rush. A reviewer who read the novel describes a cowboy, John Murdock, who wins an Oregon schoolteacher, Sarah ‘Sally’ Slowcum, in a single day in 1895. Their restlessness takes them from a Cascades lumber camp to Seattle and then, by sailboat, to south-east Alaska, where they finally settle. The film version is described differently: John marries a dance-hall girl named Sally and learns she once loved his best friend, Blackie. This suggests the film changed the heroine, so readers should check the book itself if the storyline matters. The author’s foreword is a defence of the American pioneer. It answers critics who, at the time, debunked pioneers as escapists who fled civilisation.