Martin Eden
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2022
Language: eng
Subjects: Working class -- Fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; Bildungsromans; Young men -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction; Fiction; Satire
Description: <p>Martin Eden is a young, hard working man of the working class. After a chance encounter with a beautiful woman of the bourgeoisie, he finds himself in love. In order to win this woman’s approval he decides to educate himself: He corrects his speech, he learns proper manners, and he reads the classics of literature, philosophy, and science.</p> <p>Eventually they become engaged, and he decides to become a writer. But he’s continually flummoxed by the greedy and unintelligent editors who are incapable of understanding his work, and by a society that values money as the pinnacle of success.</p> <p>In <i>Martin Eden</i>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jack-london">Jack London</a> weaves in several details from his own life and experience as an early writer. However, unlike the titular character, a self-described “individualist” and “Nietzsche-man,” London was in reality a vocal socialist, and had intended Martin Eden to be an unflattering caricature of a man who seeks only self-improvement instead of class-improvement. Ironically this was unremarked upon in contemporary reviews. As he inscribed in a copy of the novel given to <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/upton-sinclair">Upton Sinclair</a>, “One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism. I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it.”</p>