Clarice Stasz

From Historian to Mystery Writer

While teaching history at Sonoma State University, I published biographies as a way of placing individual lives within the forces of their times. American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London was my first, a couple biography of the author and his unconventional artistic wife. Next I explored the lives of women in two American dynasties, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. These revealed the significance of women in the success of so-called self-made men, what historians call Cradled in Capitalism.  Despite restrictions, many of these women became important in their own right, such as sculptor and museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, or Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a contributor to key institutions in Chicago. My last biography explored all the women related or close to Jack London, a man who admired and supported independent women.  His stepsister Eliza was a national leader in patriotic organizations, while his daughter Joan was active in socialism and worker's rights. I published with St. Martin's Press and the University of Massachusetts Press, as well as textbook publishers..

In retirement, I joined a writer's group, where I introduced pages from a manuscript written in the 1970s. With their encouragement, I reshaped the material into Slanderley: Love and Death in Cornwall.  Having been in the major publishing scene, I decided to self-publish, in part for the challenge of learning the process. Following this, though placed earlier in time, is The Slanderley Curse: Nuns and Mayhem in Cornwall. "Beautifully written and impeccably researched" concluded Kirkus Reviews.

Next in the saga of the eccentrics on the Cornwall Estate is Slanderley at War, which examines World War II activities. These books reflect my admiration for Cornwall and its people, as well as the opportunity to satirize a society like our own with a strong class structure.