The Complete Works of Jack London: The Star Rover and The Scarlet Plague

“I am still consumed with wonder why, with twenty-five published books in your possession, no good edition has ever been published of those twenty-five books, or no edition even attempted of them,” complained Jack London to his principal book publisher, George Brett of the Macmillan Company in 1911. Ignoring the question of cost estimates that clearly Brett had already performed-but not shared-London insists on the merits of a highly productive author. Quality, critical judgements, reader reports: none of this mattered in his calculus. What mattered was the respect of a well-established, income-producing author.A complete edition would be a significant sign of that respect. The Complete Works of Jack London presents readers, for the first time, with a multivolume edition of all of London's writings, including correspondence, ephemera, fiction in various genres, magazine and newspaper essays and reports, poetry, and combinations of two or more of these modes of writing; in addition, misattributed works are reprinted with documentation of their true authorship. The current offering, volume 19 of The Complete Works of Jack London: The Star Rover and The Scarlet Plague, presents the critically edited and annotated texts of two of London's late novels; he completed only one more before he died. Having dedicated himself to novel writing in the last decade of his career, he produced a striking narrative of prison reform and New Age metaphysics (The Star Rover) and a novel of disease and pandemic (The Scarlet Plague). The volume includes a preface written by Dr. Steve Gordon, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Cleveland Clinic, that illuminates crucial connections between London's novel of a worldwide plague and the event and continuing crisis of the COVID pandemic.The editorial essays in this volume accomplish a number of academic tasks. They reaffirm London's centrality to the definitions of modernism, realism, romanticism, and naturalism. Second, they demonstrate London's significant impact on the history of American publishing. As a Western proletariat writer, he expanded the notion of who could be an American author. His success raised the profile of California and the rest of the Pacific Rim.