New Release: Jeanne Reesman’s London in His Own Time (Available Dec. 15)
London in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates is based on Jeanne Reesman’s nearly thirty-five years of archival research. The book offers surprising perspectives on Jack London’s many sides by family, friends, fellow struggling young writers, business associates, high school and college classmates, interviewers, editors, coauthors, visitors to his Sonoma Valley Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen, California, and more. (Available Dec. 15)
People who have commented on and discussed the mercurial genius include Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Ambrose Bierce, and Mary Austin, as well as his half-sister, Eliza London Shepard, and his first wife, Elizabeth Bess “Bessie” Maddern London. There are a few Klondike pals he kept in touch with, and some fellow writers such as Cloudesley Johns, but many of those closest to him truly demonstrate his wide range of friends: barman Johnny Heinold; his second wife, Charmian, whom he called “Mate Woman”; his daughters, Joan and Becky; his lover, Anna Strunsky; his closest friends, especially the poet George Sterling; his former crewmate on the Snark, Martin Johnson; and his valet/memoirist, Yoshimatsu Nakata. Reesman also includes dozens of entries from Bay-area socialists, friends in Hawai‘i and the South Seas, fellow war correspondents, neighbors like Luther Burbank, and his long-time editor at Macmillan, George Brett.
Jeanne Reesman is the Jack and Laura Richmond endowed faculty fellow in American literature at the University of Texas–San Antonio.
uipress.uiowa.eduMEDIA CONTACT: Sara Hales-Brittain, Marketing Assistant
uipress-marketing@uiowa.edu
London in His Own Time244 pages • 6 x 9 inches • $80.00 paper original
ISBN: 978-1-60938-711-2 • PUB DATE: December 2020
edited by Jeanne Reesman
Writers in Their Own Time119 W Park Rd • Iowa City, IA 52242
319-335-2000 • Orders: 800-621-2736
from the University of Iowa Press
BOOK NEWS
A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
LONDON a biographical chronicle of his life, drawn from recollections, interviews, and memoirs by family, friends, and associates edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman