Martin Eden

Jack London (1876-1916)

Original en 138610 words First published 1909 United States Tales Reborn

Martin Eden is a rough, unlettered sailor in Oakland who saves an art student from a gang of thugs and is invited home to dinner. There he meets Ruth Morse, his host's sister: pale, refined, college-educated, everything the working-class world he comes from is not. He falls in love at first sight, and the visit sets the course of his life. To make himself worthy of Ruth, Martin decides to become educated and to become a writer. He teaches himself grammar from a reference book, reads voraciously in the library, sleeps five hours a night, and writes story after story, essay after essay, from the kitchen of the small house he shares with his sister and her family. The manuscripts come back from the magazines with unfailing regularity. His neighbors think he is mad, his family thinks he is idle, Ruth's family thinks he is beneath them, and Ruth herself asks him to take a steady job and give up his dream. Martin refuses. He keeps writing through hunger and rejection, sustained by his belief in his own work and by the image of success that will let him marry Ruth. Only Joe, a workmate at a laundry, and Lizzie Connolly, a working girl who loves him without conditions, stand by him. Then everything reverses. When a magazine finally accepts one story, the editors who ignored him for years discover him, publish everything they hold, and turn him into a fashion. The same drawing rooms that shut their doors now open them wide. London's novel, first published in 1909, is a fierce and clear-eyed account of ambition, class, and the machinery of literary fame, and it ends with one of the most quietly devastating final chapters in American fiction.

Public domain in the United States; text sourced from Project Gutenberg.

Martin Eden

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