MARTIN EDEN

Image from the Italian movie Martin Eden (2019)

Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer. It was first serialized in The Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909 and published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909. 
The Plot
Martin Eden is an impoverished sailor who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.
He educates himself feverishly and becomes a writer, hoping to acquire the respectability sought by his society-girl sweetheart. She spurns him, however, when his writing is rejected by several magazines and even more so when he is falsely accused of being a socialist. After he achieves fame, she tries to win him back but Martin realizes her love is false. Financially successful and robbed of connection to his own class, aware that his quest for bourgeois respectability was hollow, Eden travels to the Pacific as a sailor again.
Listen to an excerpt from Chapter Seven 

Worksheet - Transcript + Questions

The author's identification with his hero
Jack London is a born rebel whose personality demanded the immediate gratification of his contradictory wants.  Martin Eden is London's most autobiographical novel. It describes his struggle for education and literary fame in his youth and his disillusionment with success in his middle age. It mythologyzes his rise from obscurity and prophesies his early death at forty. The author's passionte identification with his hero, Martin Eden, creates the power and compulsion of the book. London had a hard rising, although not as hard as did Martin Eden. London himself was born in 1876 in  San Francisco, the only child of Flora Wellman, a spiritualist and music teacher from a  middle-class family. His father was probably a wandering astrologer called William Henry Chaney. Shortly after the boy's birth, his mother married a widower, John London, and her son was given his stepfather's name. Martin Eden has mysteriously no parents, but only many brothers and sisters.

Luca Marinelli as Martin Eden (2019)

After spending several years at sea, working in factories he ended up unemployed and then in jail for vagrancy. Once he touched the bottom, he decided he only wanted to rise and began his frantic pursuit of knowledge. With the financial help of his mother, he attended the University of California at Berkeley for two semesters, grasping at knowledge with the desperation of a drowning man and the arrogance of the self - taught. He met a middle-class family, the Applegarths, and fell in love with their daughter, Mabel, whose ethereal beauty embodied the visions of his favourite poets. Mabel Applegarth was the model for Ruth Morse in the novel.    During the time, however, when the young Jack London adored Mabel Applegarth, he was trying to adopt the values of her class and to leave his own.  An attack to individualism
The novel, London always insisted, was also an attack on individualism. "Being unaware of the needs of others, of the whole human collective need, Martin Eden lived only for himself, fought only for himself, and, if you please, died for himself". He died for his lack of faith in men. London, however, claimed to have faith in men. He was a socialist and not an individualist. And so he lived.