Julie of the Wolves

Julie of the Wolves is a children's novel by the American writer Jean Craighead George, published by Harper in 1972 with illustrations by John Schoenherr.

Its central figure is Miyax, an Inuk girl of thirteen who is married into a family she cannot settle with and who runs away with a plan to reach the coast, find a ship and travel to San Francisco, where the pen pal she has never met lives. What she does instead is get lost on the tundra of the Alaska North Slope, and the novel follows the weeks she spends there, working out how to read the country and how to make herself acceptable to a wolf pack whose lead animal she begins to understand. George went to Barrow in 1971 with her son to research wolves, and the book came out of that trip, which is why the wolves' behaviour is described with as much attention as the girl's.

The novel won the Newbery Medal, and two sequels followed: Julie in 1994 and Julie's Wolf Pack in 1997.