California Critic

CONTINENT'S END--edifed by Joseph Henry Jackson--Whittlesey House--($3.50).

On the Pacific Coast, the word of Joseph Henry Jackson* is literary law. Eastern publishers quote his reviews, publish almost any manuscript he recommends. This year his influence has swept over the Sierras with even more spectacular results than usual. Two current bestsellers are books that he plugged before publication. Joseph Pennell's turgid History of Rome Hanks (to date: 93,000 copies), and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber/- (400,000 copies).

Maker & Breaker. Critic Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer, has been a West Coast literary authority for 20 years. Now 50, he was born in New Jersey, studied at Lafayette, was a lieutenant in World War I. He got into advertising in California after the war, was editor of Sunset Magazine for eight years. In 1924 he began a weekly half- hour broadcast on books over San Francisco's station KGO which was steadily popular until he quit in 1942.

Books that he praises, even unknowns like Rudolph Altrocchi's Sleuthing in the Stacks and Alan Kapelner's Lonely Boy Blues, became sell-outs on the Coast. The San Francisco Grabhorn Press's de luxe edition of Joaquin Murrieta, The Brigand Chief of California was sold to the last copy the day after Jackson praised it over the air. When he panned such nationwide best-sellers as Hervey Allen's Action at Aquila, Charles Morgan's Sparkenbroke and Lloyd Douglas' Home for Christmas, they ceased to sell on the Coast. (But Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends kept on selling despite his criticism.) Critic Jackson's own books of travel and California history (Mexican Interlude, Notes on a Drum, Anybody's Gold&) have sold only moderately well.

Reading & Riding. Jackson reviews five books a week in his daily Chronicle column; he also edits the Sunday book page. His reviews are calm, clear, essayish. He reads the books commuting to & from his home near the University of California campus in Berkeley, and in bed before going to sleep. (He is careful to vary his schedule of commuting trains so that acquaintances will not interrupt his reading.) Youthful-looking, smooth-featured, with clear blue eyes and invariably wrinkled clothes, he has a perpetual air of urbanity, never loses his temper or tells people stories they have heard before. He lives with his pretty wife Charlotte (who writes children's books) and his daughter Marion, 17, in a modern redwood-paneled house. With some neighbors, he organized an armchair strategists' society after Pearl Harbor. Jackson also belongs to a club of mystery-story writers (Erie Stanley Gardner was an editorial colleague on the Sunset). For one club dinner, which 13 members were scheduled to attend, it was decided that a body should be found at the table. The club invited Cinemactress Jane Russell--"probably," says Jackson, "the best body available at that time."

Coastal Anthology. In Continent's End readers can get a clear picture of Jackson's literary likings when he is unconcerned with reviews or discoveries. A bulky 415-page anthology of California writing, it includes 39 selections of prose and poetry, excerpts from the novels of Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, poetry by Robinson Jeffers, Hildegarde Planner, Marie de L. Welch, a short story by William Saroyan, excerpts from the autobiographies of Lincoln Steffens and Gertrude Atherton. [CLOSE_P]

There is solid writing in Continent's End and some valuable social history. It is most appealing when it is least self-consciously Californian. Its strength is that it takes its locale seriously, its weakness that it often tries to make the locale itself of primary importance.

* Not to be confused with Joe ("Shoeless") Jackson, oldtime American League baseballer. /-Like the popular brands of cigarets, most best-sellers are currently "sold out" most of the time, or sales figures would be much higher.

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