Not often does a biography begin with a villain—a biographer no less. In a rousing opening, Iris Jamahl Dunkle has Irving Stone explode on the scene, romancing Jack London’s widow, Charmian Kittredge London, and dancing her into cooperating with his desire to write a biography, Sailor on Horseback (1938), which casts the woman as the femme fatale that, in effect, drives her husband Jack to suicide. Dunkle’s book might well be titled “Justice to Charmian.” Stone’s life of London is really a biographical novel. He went in search of an archive in the London home that served his sensationalistic purposes, even though the facts—such as London’s death by kidney failure—were amply established.

So well does Dunkle present her case for a revised biography of Charmian that she perhaps overlooks what Stone or any biographer had to contend with. Like other widows who behave as keepers of the flame, Charmian had a vision of her husband she wanted to preserve for posterity. As Dunkle points out, in Charmian’s own biography of her husband, The Book of Jack London (1921), she rearranged certain events and took liberties that no biographer adhering to the facts could condone. Stone, for all his faults, would have had a hard time with Charmian even if he had chosen not to be so high-handed and intent on forcing the evidence to fit the story he wanted to tell.

But Stone is a good foil for an honest and scrupulous biographer like Dunkle, who gets