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 Septem-ber 1909 and then published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909.

Eden represents writers’ frustration with publishers. The central theme of Eden’s developing artistic sensibil-ities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman, which narrates an artist’s formation and develop-ment.

Eden differs from London in rejecting socialism, attacking it as “slave morality” and relying on Nietzschean in-dividualism. Nevertheless, in the copy of the novel which he inscribed for Upton Sinclair, London wrote, “One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it.”

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