Martin Eden

Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer.

Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse. Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background and the Morses are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of wealth and refinement.

Eden represents writers' frustration with publishers by speculating that when he mails off a manuscript, a "cunning arrangement of cogs" immediately puts it in a new envelope and returns it automatically with a rejection slip. The central theme of Eden's developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman, in which is narrated the formation and development of an artist.

Eden differs from London in that Eden rejects socialism, attacking it as "slave morality", and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. In a note to Upton Sinclair, London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."

Jack London (1876-1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

London's most famous novels are The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden.


  1. Martin Eden- Audiobook

    Jack London, Classic Audiobooks

    audiobook
  2. World's Greatest Sci-Fi Stories

    Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Mateo Falcone, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Guy De Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, H.G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Jack London, E. M. Forster

    audiobook
  3. The Complete Novels of Jack London : Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, Martin Eden, and More

    Jack London, Zenith Evergreen Literary Co

    book
  4. The Scarlet Plague : A Chilling Dystopian Classic of Survival and Collapse

    Jack London, Zenith Evergreen Literary Co

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  5. The Son of the Wolf

    Jack London

    audiobookbook
  6. Dead Men Tell No Tales - 60+ Pirate Novels, Treasure-Hunt Tales & Sea Adventure Classics : A Swashbuckling Voyage Through Time and Legend

    Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, William Hope Hodgson, Howard Pyle, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Le Gallienne, Daniel Defoe, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Ellms, Frederick Marryat, Harold MacGrath, Joseph Lewis French, Harry Collingwood, Stanley Lane-Poole, Charles Boardman Hawes, L. Frank Baum, J.M. Barrie, R.M Ballantyne, G. A Henty, J. D. Jerrold Kelley, J. Allan Dunn, Robert E. Howard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sir Walter Scott, Ralph D. Paine, Captain Charles Johnson, W. H. G. G Kingston, Currey E. Hamilton, John Esquemeling

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  7. Dystopian Classics

    Gertrude Barrows Bennett, Jack London, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells

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  8. 50 WESTERNS (Vol. 1) : Man in the Saddle, Winnetou, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Last of the Mohicans, Rimrock Trail...

    Karl May, James Fenimore Cooper, Max Brand, James Oliver Curwood, B.M. Bower, Zane Grey, Jackson Gregory, Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Emerson Hough, Andy Adams, Bret Harte, Owen Wister, O.Henry, Grace Livingston Hill, Charles Alden Seltzer, Dane Coolidge, Frederic Homer Balch, Frederic Remington, Robert W. Chambers, Frank H. Spearman, J. Allan Dunn, Robert E. Howard, Ernest Haycox, Charles Siringo

    book
  9. Deadly Sails - Complete Collection : History of Pirates, Trues Stories about the Most Notorious Pirates & Most Famous Pirate Novels

    Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, William Hope Hodgson, Charles Kingsley, Howard Pyle, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Marryat, Washington Irving, Harold MacGrath, Joseph Lewis French, William Clark Russell, Harry Collingwood, Max Pemberton, Charles Boardman Hawes, L. Frank Baum, J.M. Barrie, R.M Ballantyne, G. A Henty, J. Allan Dunn, Robert E. Howard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. G. G Kingston, Charles Johnson, Maturin Murray Ballou

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  10. American Short Stories

    Frank Norris, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe

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  11. Ulvehunden

    Jack London, Maj Bylock

    audiobookbook
  12. Dystopias. Сlassic collection. Illustrated : Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Iron Heel, 1900: Or; The Last President, We

    George Orwell, Jack London, Aldous Huxley, Ingersoll Lockwood, Yevgeny Zamyatin

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