| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jack London's Women. By Clarice Stasz. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. xviii, 393 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-55849-301-8.)

In a lengthy preface, dealing partly with personal experiences, and in the epilogue, Clarice Stasz expounds on previous scholarship, "deficient" because rooted in personal bias, stressing that her own approach as a "social historian" (pp. xiii, xiv) is unique and that she hopes "to correct assumptions concerning London's life and times" (p. xiii). Ironically, her own biography is at least as prejudiced as the most biased biographies published to date, and it suffers from the same flaws she chastises others for.

This is regrettable for obvious reasons, but especially because, while Stasz researched the library holdings of Jack London's unpublished material, she also had access to documents until now closed to other scholars—the document and manuscript collection belonging to Helen Abbott, daughter-in-law of London's elder daughter, Joan. The book should thus be a mine of new and challenging information. But Stasz's selective use of verifiable sources and her ignoring of evidence inconsistent with her concept of London and the women in his life undermines what new information she presents from Abbott's documents, whether acknowledged as such or merely presented as fact with no documented source. As a result, scholars familiar with available documents can give little credence to what she presents from manuscripts they have no access to.

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