BOOK REVIEW: JACK LONDON'S RACIAL LIVES, A Critical Biography

the spectrum of the famous author's racial views

JACK LONDON'S RACIAL LIVES, A Critical Biography by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. U. of Georgia Press, Athens, GA; www.ugapress.org; rhuff@ugapress.uga.edu. 2009. 389+xviii pages. $34.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8203-2789-1. photographs, chronology, notes, bibliography, index.

Jack London was a self-avowed proponent of the late Victorian/early 20th century "scientific racialism" supposedly derived from Darwin's theory of evolution. The "scientific racialism" held the superiority of the white race. Nonetheless, London's racial views as depicted and implied in his writings were much more complex; to the point of raising questions about whether London really did believe in "scientific racialism. The U. of Texas English professor Reesman sees this author's racial views conventional among whites of the era as associated with the rough conditions of his childhood, but as demonstrably being considerably modified or even abandoned as London moved to and wrote about far-flung parts of the world. It is in London's fiction, Reesman notes, with the characterizations, settings, interplay of characters, and resolutions of fiction, where his complex feelings and observations about race are most evident.

London was a pioneer in the realistic/naturalistic style of literature coming about in the early 1900s. He wrote journalism about the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the heavyweight championship boxing match pitting the African-American Jack Johnson against the white man Tommy Burns in 1908, and the Mexican Revolution in 1914. Reesman follows how in London's series of writings on the heavyweight fight, his regard of Johnson underwent a sea change. Settings of London's fiction were the wilderness of Alaska or the Klondike, the remote islands of the South Pacific, or some other unpopulated place where individuals had to use their wits and their strength to survive in direct contact with nature. London's stories drew the interest of movie studios for their adventure and drama of survival.

Reesman relates London's ambivalence and changing views toward race as a sequence of "homes" corresponding to the actual homes the writer lived in different parts of the world. The organization of her book is thus biographical, not thematic or theoretical reflecting some school of literary critique. This seems only natural considering London's rootedness in journalism and naturalism. The literary critique places London alongside Conrad and Kipling as a late Victorian/early 20th century white author whose works shed much light on the era's insubstantial, largely fanciful theories of white superiority and portray alternate views on other races inhabiting the settings of their books. This book also has the special treat of more than 40 photographs taken by Jack London. Reesman is at work coediting a major book of collected photographs of London to be published by the publisher of this work.