BACKLIST

Review By Joanne Forman

MARTIN EDEN
By Jack London

Today’s readers, if they’ve heard of Jack London at all, know of him as author of the dog story, “The Call of the Wild,” or robust tales of the gold strike in Alaska in 1898.
But his seminal work was the heavily autobiographical MARTIN EDEN, the quintessential novel of America, the poor boy who, after tremendous struggle– makes good—and, perhaps not so typically, finds it all hollow.

Jack London certainly came from the dregs; he was what in those days was called “illegitimate,” the fruit of a liason between an unknown father and a highly neurotic mother who wore out her life and his youth in one flopped scheme after another to get rich quick.

Reared in bitter poverty, working in his early youth eighteen hours a day or more, he escaped to sea, to Alaska, to the Orient, to the Pacific; he became the highest paid and most famous author of his day and died at forty, from an accidental or on-purpose overdose. He had two wives, indulging in the then scandalous practice of divorce. He was a fervent and famous Socialist—and a standard racist of the times, indulging in the claptrap about the “Anglo-Saxon, the blond beast.” He would have agreed that consistency is for small minds.

MARTIN EDEN chronicles this colorful, energetic and ultimately tragic life with a brio that is utterly contemporary, though first published in 1909.
Try it, you’ll love it.