4 3 2 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) W INTER 1 9 9 9 anticipate the “generic instabilities and epistemological uncertainties” asso ciated with postmodernism) (34, 64, 76, 88, 130, 150). To his credit, Messent analyzes these texts in prose mercifully free of critical jargon, though I must lodge a minor complaint: either Messent or a careless copyeditor consistently misspells “Pudd’nhead” as “Puddn’head.” Still, Messent’s study is a useful overview, one worthy to stand on the same shelf with Michelson’s book, Henry Nash Smith’s Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, and James M. Cox’s Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. Selected Letters of Hamlin Qarland. Edited by Keith Newlin and Joseph B. McCullough. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 455 pages, $55.00. Reviewed by Donald Pizer Tulane University, New Orleans Hamlin Garland offers a striking instance of the vagaries of literary rep utation in America. Considered a radical new voice in the 1890s because of his dramatization of the plight of the impoverished midwestem farmer and his championing of such causes as women’s rights and the single tax, by the 1920s he was a favorite target of the youthful radicals of that moment because of his rejection of their efforts at a fuller fictional and dramatic representation of the sexual in human affairs. The 1950s and 1960s, follow ing his death in 1940, saw some effort to recover his important role in tumof -the-century American literary and cultural history. During the last several decades, however, his seeming exemplification of the ultimate in a benighted WASP provincialism and self-certainty, especially in his scarcely disguised ethnic prejudices, has resulted in a drying up of most academic interest. The collection of Garland’s selected letters, superbly edited by Keith Newlin and Joseph McCullough and handsomely produced by the Univer sity of Nebraska Press, is a significant exception to this neglect. Garland’s varied professional activities and enthusiasms, as well as significant moments of his personal life, are well represented in the selection, from his early efforts to establish himself as a writer in mid-1880s literary Boston to his final bitterness as a neglected “son of the middle border” in the anomalous glitter of 1930s Los Angeles. Of special interest to the western scholar are his efforts to describe and defend his mountain fiction and his correspon dence with Theodore Roosevelt and others on conservation and Indian affairs. If there is any weakness in the editors’ efforts to capture the full range of Garland’s interests, it is that they have been limited to using a little over four hundred letters (out of the roughly fifty-three hundred extant) to ren der a fifty-five-year career. There is thus often a gap of several months or more between one letter and the next, causing the volume to lose whatever B o o k R e v i e w s 4 3 3 “life in letters” role it might play as a continuous record of Garland’s movements and activities. In addition, Garland’s correspondence offers few reve lations about his life and work. Both the fact that he often mined his letters for his published autobiographies and that he was by nature not prone to intimacy in his correspondence result in a confirmation of what has been known rather than in any surprises. What the collection does provide, how ever, is an evocative firsthand record of the interests and concerns of a sem inal American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and as such, it is a major contribution and is much welcomed. Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels: From Naturalism to Nature. By Christopher Gair. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1997. 230 pages, $89.95. Reviewed by Tony Williams Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels is a book-length col lection of essays, several of which have appeared in many journals. How ever, the author links familiar and new treatments together in a consecutive narrative sequence united by the themes identified in the book’s title. Gair attempts a rigorous examination of a “constant tension between...