Martin Eden

A self-educated sailor from the docks of Oakland falls for a cultured young woman far above his station, and sets out to make himself worthy of her the only way he knows: writing his way into the literary world she belongs to, through years of poverty, rejection, and relentless self-improvement — success that arrives, when it finally does, too late to mean what he once thought it would.

Jack London published Martin Eden in 1909, drawing heavily on his own early struggles as a self-taught writer; London himself later described the novel, often mistaken for a simple success story, as an attack on the individualist philosophy that destroys its own hero.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.