Martin Eden
About this audiobook
Martin Eden is living in California at the beginning of the 1900s where he struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse, a member of a bourgeois family. But as Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background, a marriage between them would be impossible, unless he reached their level of wealth and status.
Eden promises Ruth that success will come. Although an impoverished seaman, he obsessively and aggressively pursues dreams of education and literary fame. But Ruth loses her patience and rejects him in a letter.
By the time Eden gains success with publishers and the bourgeoisie who had shunned him, he has developed a grudge against them and become jaded by toil and unrequited love. His success fails to satisfy him, and he comes to believe that people did not value him for himself or for his work but only for his fame.
Martin Eden is considered a semiautobiographical novel in which Jack London expressed his critique of individualism.
Discover more
About the author
Jack London (1876–1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. Before making a living at his writing, he spent time as an oyster pirate, a sailor, a cannery worker, a gold miner, and a journalist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction writing. He is best known for his novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike gold rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” and “Love of Life.” He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen.” He was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, including The Iron Heel, The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.
Edoardo Ballerini is a two-time winner of the Audio Publisher Association’s Best Male Narrator Award, a two-time winner of Society of Voice Arts Awards, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019.
