Martin Eden

by Jack London

Martin Eden, published in 1909, is the most autobiographical of Jack London's novels. A rough young sailor from the Oakland waterfront saves a man in a fight and is invited into the home of a wealthy family, where he falls in love with the daughter, Ruth Morse, and with the world of books and ideas she represents. He sets himself to become a writer, starving in a rented room while the magazines return his manuscripts, and when fame finally comes he finds that it has arrived too late to mean anything. London intended the book as an attack on individualism; readers have usually taken it as a portrait of the writer's struggle. The ending is among the bleakest in American fiction. It is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, with the first chapter free.