The River’s End was published by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation in 1919, and it is Curwood’s most ingeniously plotted human-adventure novel. John Keith, a man wrongly accused of murder, flees into the Arctic pursued by Dorey Dorian, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. When Dorian dies of exposure in the wilderness, Keith — who has come to admire and even love the dying man — takes his identity, returns to civilization as “Dorian,” and must maintain the deception while the real killer remains free.
The identity-swap premise gives the novel a psychological complexity unusual in Curwood’s work. Keith must learn to be Dorian — to know what Dorian knew, to have Dorian’s friends, to love Dorian’s sister (who gradually suspects that this man is not her brother). The tension between Keith’s own identity and the role he must play provides the novel’s emotional engine, and Curwood handles it with surprising sophistication.
The wilderness sections (the pursuit, the dying) are characteristically vivid — Curwood’s Arctic landscape is a place of terrible beauty where death by cold is always close — and the civilized sections (Keith-as-Dorian navigating social situations) demonstrate that Curwood could write convincingly about human society as well as about the wild.
The novel was adapted into a successful film in 1920.
Collecting The River’s End
First edition (Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York, 1919): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition with dust jacket: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $10–$30