Clarice Stasz

From Historian to Mystery Writer

 

My career began as an educational researcher at Johns Hopkins University. There I edited the journal Simulation and Games, and wrote two books on the use of simulation in the classroom.

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. 

Long interested in the intersection of race, gender, and power, I also wrote text books. These include Sexism: Scientific Debates; Male and Female: Socialization, Social Roles, and Social Structure, and The Social Control of Deviance: A Critical Perspective.  A postdoctorate at Brown University on African American history resulted in The American Nightmare, an examination of economic inequality by race and gender.

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, which is steeped in the late 1920s/30s.

 Having been in the major publishing world, I decided to self-publish, in part for the challenge of learning the process. A techie person, I enjoyed learning the many skills required to create a print book, an ebook, and, most recently, an audible version.  Next came The Slanderley Curse: Nuns and Mayhem in Cornwall, which takes place during the Edwardian Era. "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, built upon a strong class structure.