The story begins before the wolf-dog hybrid is born, with two men and their sled dog team on a journey to deliver the coffin of Lord Alfred to a remote town named Fort McGurry in the higher area of the Yukon Territory.

Finally, after all of their dogs and Bill have been eaten, more teams find Henry escaping from the wolves; the wolf pack scatters when they hear the large group of people coming.

When the pack finally brings down a moose, the famine is ended; they eventually split up, and the story now follows a she-wolf and her mate, One Eye.

White Fang has a harsh life in the native camp; the current puppy pack, seeing him as a wolf, immediately attacks him.

He earns the respect of Grey Beaver when he saves his son Mit-Sah from a group of boys seeking revenge for White Fang attacking one of them for trying to beat him for no reason.

There, a malicious dog-fighter named "Beauty" Smith connives to get Grey Beaver addicted to whiskey, and then when drunk sell White Fang to him.

White Fang defeats all opponents pitted against him, including several wolves and a lynx, until a bulldog called Cherokee is brought in to fight him.

Cherokee has the upper hand in the fight when he grips the skin and fur of White Fang's neck and begins to throttle him.

"[2] London himself took influence from Herbert Spencer's words: "survival of the fittest", as well as Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of a "superman" (or "superdog", in this instance) and of "the worship of power".

"[3] Virginia Crane claims that the novel is "generally regarded as artistically inferior to its companion piece [The Call of the Wild], but [that it] helped establish London as a popular American literary figure".

President Theodore Roosevelt, who first spoke out against the "sham naturalists" in 1907, specifically named London as one of the so-called "nature fakers".

Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.