Irving Stone’s Jack London: His Life, Sailor on Horseback (A Biography) and 28 Selected Jack London Stories by Irving Stone and Jack London, and: Jack London, Sailor on Horseback: A Biography by Irving Stone (review)

268 Western American Literature establishment of a new village. When he is fully mature and a legendary hunter, Toozak selects a bride, or rather she is selected for him, and works his way through the complex but fascinating rules of courtship to win his wife. The birth of Toozak’s son is a fine piece of writing as is the death of an old person, the mother of the head of another household. In classic Eskimo tradition she asks her son to release her to the spirits when she is terminally ill. Obeying, he carries her outside into the dark and slips a noose over her head. Through a tragic misjudgment Toozak and five other hunters are carried out to sea on an ice floe. He and three others survive to reach land and find their way home two years later. The year is 1878, the year that the Russians arrive in tall sailing vessels and exchange beads, whiskey and guns for baleen and ivory. The Eskimos spend the summer in drunken carousals, an object lesson to Toozak. Food supplies are diminished by the time the winter sets in and when the harshest storm in anyone’s memory sets in for months, starvation strikes. The return of spring does not bring the food-bearing ice floes until almost too late. When they finally do arrive there are not enough men and boys left alive for three whaling crews and Toozak and his father set out for the mainland to recruit people. As Kaka walks with his wife-to-be along a high cliff, the history of the island is repeated before their eyes. Several boats full of people arrive on Sevuokuk as they did in the beginning. Margaret Murie has taken on thirty-three characters, the history of a remarkable people, birds, waves, winds and blizzards, and has turned out a beautiful book infused with her own love of wild Alaska. JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE, Chappaqua, New York Irving Stone’s Jack London: His Life, Sailor on Horseback (A Biography) and 28 Selected Jack London Stories. By Irving Stone and Jack London. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. 777 pages, $12.95.) Jack London, Sailor on Horseback: A Biography. By Irving Stone. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. 305 pages, $8.95.) Another issuance of this 40-year-old, universally popular Jack London biography ordinarily would attract little notice. Even Doubleday’s decision to bring out two editions of it within months of one another is only passing strange. The first, released August 26, 1977, has the principal distinction of carrying as awkward a title as has been concocted in recent times, together with a rather weird tail-wagging-the-dog assemblage of London stories selected “within available space and copyright restrictions,” whatever that means. The 28 stories range from the perfectly awful “Their Alcove” and “Amateur Night” to the sublime “All Gold Cañón,” “The White Reviews 269 Silence,” “Odyssey of the North,” and “To Build a Fire.” The second of the two, the biography without the stories, was issued on March 3, 1978. What makes the new editions of Sailor on Horseback news is the author’s statement in his new Foreword, that the book has been “thoroughly corrected and updated.” Alas, this statement is not true, but before analyzing the differences between the original 1938 edition and the “thoroughly corrected and updated” ones of 1977-78, it might be appropriate to relate what some of the deficiencies of the original were in the first place. These deficiencies have gone unnoticed by virtually all save the most devoted of London researchers, but this is not to say they were trivial. Earle Labor, in an “Open Letter to Irving Stone” published in the Jack London Newsletter of October 24, 1969, declared that Sailor not only contained considerable fiction, it contained some of London’s own fiction, used without quotation marks. Said Labor: “Some modem scholars still take Sailor on Horseback as ‘The Gospel of Jack’ because they do not care much for Jack London to begin with and find it easy to believe the worst of* him, e.g., that he was a natural child who died an unnatural death...