Today, all aspects of racial inequality and injustice are becoming more visible, better understood, and their origins and causes more thoroughly examined. Now is the time to expand our collective understanding of Jack London’s perspective as seen through the lens of racial justice. To that end, we are working with a team of London scholars and educators to account for it and learn from it. These reflections and research endeavors will help inform training for park guides to foster deeper understanding and engagement with visitors. To begin our journey, we have compiled a resource list which contains books and articles that address issues of race and politics, relating to both the dominant culture at the turn of 20th century America and to the author himself. Our intention is to grow this list as our knowledge and awareness around this critical issue does. Jack London’s books and the biographies listed below can be found in our online book shop at https://jacklondonpark.com/jacks-shop/all-items/
BIOGRAPHIES
Books:
FEATURED RESOURCE FOR THIS LIST: Jack London’s Racial Lives; A Critical Biography by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Reesman offers the first full study of the exceptionally important topic of race and racism in Jack London’s life. Raised in conflicting environments, London learned racist attitudes from his emotionally distant mother while also being nurtured and guided by his foster mother, a formerly enslaved woman whom he lived with for the first several years of his life. Exploring the national politics and culture of the day, as well as his own stories and articles, Reesman strives to unravel the complexity around Jack London’s conflicting and dynamic attitudes around race over the course of his life. She offers specific examples and book titles to illustrate this discussion.
An American Life, Jack London. Written by Earle Labor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
A comprehensive and deeply researched biography. Considered by many to be the definitive work on London’s life and adventures. Earle Labor also covers London’s early relationships with people of color and his unique interactions with indigenous peoples around the South Pacific Islands and Asia.
Author Under Sail; The Imagination of Jack London by Jay Williams. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
First complete literary biography of Jack London and his professional writing career, this book examines London’s literary imagination and the themes that drove his works in realism and naturalism.
A Pictorial Biography of Jack London by Russ Kingman. Triality, s.r.o, 1979.
This pictorial biography shares a visual history of the life and times of Jack London; sharing the places he lived, people he knew, and painting a picture of the world that shaped Jack London as a man and writer.
Jack London’s Women by Clarice Stasz. University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
This biography shares some of London’s important relationships with people of color by examining the key women in his life who nurtured, challenged, and influenced him in critical ways. Included among these stories is the formative and life-long relationship with his wet nurse and beloved caretaker Jennie Prentiss, a formerly enslaved woman, as well as his early love interests which include a Jewish intellectual and socialist and a young African American woman.
A Writer’s Fight for a Better America by Cecelia Tichi. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Tichi examines London’s breadth of work from the late 1800’s through the early 1900’s in order to trace his voice as an active socialist, artist, and public figure of his day.
Articles:
Jack London’s Racial Lives: A Critical Biography (review). January 2010American Studies 51(1):148-149
DOI: 10.1353/ams.2010.0069
Authors: John Lennon
8.05University of South Florida
A clear and concise synopsis of Jeanne Reesman’s Jack London’s Racial Lives; A Critical Biography. The author’s perspective offers another voice on the complexity of Jack London’s racialism in both his literature and is life.
J. London and Race Relations in the Progressive Era – 2021
STAFF ESSAY – This essay is our contribution to the conversation around Jack London and the issues of racism. Our goal with this is to give an overview of some of the immense scholarship that has been amassed around Jack London and this important issue. We want to address this topic in an honest, respectful, and thoughtful way that can contribute to the greater learning that is going on in our country today. We consider this a living document that will evolve as our knowledge and understanding does.
Leprosy and Colonial Discourse: Jack London and Hawaii by Rod Edmond Wasafiri, 12:25, 78-82, 1997
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02690059708589546?journalCode=rwas20
A scholarly article detailing the effects of colonialism and leprosy in Hawaii; this piece seeks to put into context the radical act of breaking bread with people that society viewed as “untouchable,” the way Jack London did with the lepers of Molokai.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT MID 1800’s – EARLY 1900’s
Books:
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Takaki, Ronald T. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.
A Different Mirror retells history through the eyes of marginalized people in the “melting pot” of America. As it pertains to Jack London specifically, Takaki tackles racial science and how it influenced a post-Civil War America, racial politics in the Socialist movement, and Hawaii as Jack London would have seen it evolve.
A People’s History of the United States: 1492–present by Zinn, Howard. HarperCollins, 1999.
Often a polarizing historian, Howard Zinn writes in a voice that the working class, Socialist in Jack London would appreciate. There are chapters devoted to the working poor, racial politics and how it divided the Socialist movement and Manifest Destiny as it pertains to Hawaii.
Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism by Reginald Horsman. Harvard University Press; Revised ed. Edition, 1981.
Reginald Horsman’s book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation’s ideology by 1850. Manifest Destiny and racialism informed the Social Darwinism that London believed.
Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats. Verso 2014.
A well-researched book on the anti-Asian propaganda that fed anti-Asian sentiment and laws from the late 1800’s to 2014.
The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai by John Tayman
The Colony is a painstakingly researched look into the Molokai leper colony and would provide a greater context for how radical it was that Jack and Charmian London met freely and broke bread with these societal “untouchables” of the time.
Articles:
Social Darwinism in the Gilded Age. AP.USH: KC‑6.3.I.A (KC), MIG (Theme), Unit 6: Learning Objective G – The belief that white, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon Americans were biologically superior to other groups fueled many social and political trends of the Gilded Age.
A good overview of Social Darwinism and it’s effects on culture, economics, and society during the early 20th c.
Plague in San Francisco: Rats, Racism and Reform by Tilli Tansey. Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 24 Apr. 2019
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01239-x
An eerily prescient article about the rise of anti-immigrant, specifically anti-Asian, attitudes during times of “plague.” It starts with the bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco in 1900 and provides good context for racial attitudes in the early 1900’s as well as today.