Jack London’s Martin Eden: A Novel of About an Autodidact Dude

Jack London’s Martin Eden has been named-dropped by Tom Waits and the Twilight Singers, and it appears in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America (1984), as well as Régis Wargnier’s The Woman of My Life (1986) and Caroline Bottaro’s Queen to Play (2009). It’s been made into at least four different movies, the first one in 1914. It is also mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), and all these signs point to Martin Eden being a quietly beloved and underrated book.

This book is an example of a Künstlerroman, a German term that basically translates to “artist’s novel” in English that describes a book about an artist growing into their proficiency. Other English-language examples of Künstlerroman include James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and of course, London’s Martin Eden. The eponymous protagonist begins the book as a sailor who isn’t very educated in terms of book-learning and speaking the Queen’s English, but he’s also fully aware of his intellectual limitations and when he starts crushing on a young woman above his social class, he starts reading more and more in an attempt to better appeal to her bourgeois sensibilities.

He actually ends up pursuing learning with an aggressive obsession, and Martin Eden is not un-autobiographical. There are absolutely parallels between the title character and its author, as both are autodidact sailors who found themselves the toast of the cultural elite. London was a weirdly contradictory guy, and there are also contradictions between him and Martin that stand out. London was an early advocate of socialism in America, yet there is a pretty driven pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps quality to Martin.

Of course, there is a price to pay for getting smarter. The more aware you are of what’s going on in the world, the more you are able to notice how class and education and wealth and social castes can divide us, and if you have any sense of empathy and compassion at all, the more you’ll realize just how screwed up and unfair the world is. And the more you understand this, the further it can isolate you from everyone else. That is a special kind of loneliness, one that our hero learns about all too well. 



Jack London published a lot of bangers — from Call of the Wild to The Sea-Wolf and White Fang — and Martin Eden is another demonstration of his genius.

Click on the book to buy Martin Eden by Jack London!

We also covered other works of Jack London, including White Fang and Call of the Wild and Iron Heel and The Game and The Sea-Wolf and John Barleycorn and Before Adam and Martin Eden and A Daughter of the Snows and The Cruise of the Dazzler.

Cover Image Credit: Image of eventual Jack London Square in 1913 by Horace E. Smith circa 1913 and is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Book cover image containing the frontispiece of the 1909 publication of Martin Eden is by The Kinneys and is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Image of Jack London is by Arnold Genthe circa 1916 and is also part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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