Martin Eden

Martin Eden is 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. Eden represents a writers' frustration with publishers by speculating that when he mails off a manuscript, they immediately put it in a new envelope and returns it automatically with a rejection slip. The central theme of Eden's developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the K nstlerroman, in which is narrated the formation and development of an artist. Eden rejects socialism, attacking it as "slave morality", and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. In a note to Upton Sinclair, London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism. I must have bungled, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."