The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild was published by Doubleday, Page in 1916, and it is the novel that marks Curwood’s conversion from sportsman to conservationist. The story is based on a real experience: in 1911, Curwood tracked a large grizzly bear through the Canadian Rockies for days, finally got within killing range, and found himself unable to pull the trigger. The bear, looking back at him, seemed to embody something that Curwood could not bring himself to destroy.
The novel tells the story largely from the bear’s perspective: Thor, a massive grizzly, adopts a motherless black bear cub named Muskwa, and the two navigate the Rockies together while being pursued by a hunter. Curwood grants the bear complex consciousness — Thor reasons, remembers, fears, and shows compassion — in a way that is anthropomorphic but serves the novel’s moral purpose: if we grant animals interiority, we can no longer kill them casually.
The book directly inspired the 1988 Jean-Jacques Annaud film The Bear — a commercial hit that brought Curwood’s conservationist message to a new generation. The novel’s influence on the development of wildlife conservation literature, while difficult to measure precisely, was significant: it helped establish the narrative of the hunter’s conversion that has become a staple of conservation writing.
Collecting The Grizzly King
First edition (Doubleday, Page, New York, 1916): Cloth binding, frontispiece.
Market values:
- First edition with dust jacket: $100–$250
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$15