Joan London (American writer)
Joan London (January 15, 1901 – January 18, 1971) was an American writer and the older of two daughters born to Jack London and his first wife, Elizabeth "Bess" Maddern London.
Writing career[edit]
Joan London's first publication was a serial published in the Oakland Tribune from December 6, 1926 to February 24, 1927. Sylvia Coventry is reminiscent of her father's love triad novels. Sylvia rebuffs a proposal and moves to Hawaii to work on as the welfare worker on a plantation. There she is bewitched by an ominous intruder who provokes her into various incarnations. This one attempt at fiction convinced her it was not her metier.
Trained in historical research, during the late 1930s, Joan researched Jack London and His Times, a biography of her father.[10] To do so, she received permission from Charmian Kittredge London to view her father's archive at the Huntington Library; being cut out of her father's will, she had no independent right.
She co-authored So Shall Ye Reap: The Story of Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement with Henry Anderson.[11] They provide an early history of the movement, beginning with Father Thomas McCullough and Ernesto Galarza. They also fault Mexico for failing to provide a sustainable economy for its poor.
Her son Bart Abbott ensured the posthumous publication of her memoir Jack London and his Daughters.[12] There she emphasized the trauma of divorce on children.