The Nexus Archive
American Naturalism · Novel
Martin Eden
by London · The Novelist of the Wild · Turn-of-the-century America, 1876-1916
A working sailor remakes himself for love and literature, then confronts the machinery of recognition.
- Advanced
- ~10 hr 15 min read
- 4 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the CHAPTER IX. guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
A Sailor Among Books
Martin Eden knows ships, hard work and the violence of ports. In the Morse family's Oakland drawing room, he scarcely knows where to put his hands. Ruth Morse, a university student, seems to possess everything he lacks: ease, learning and a language equal to the beauty he feels. His attraction to her opens an enormous appetite for books.
Jack London's 1909 novel makes self-education intensely physical. Martin studies grammar, wrestles with philosophy and writes through hunger and exhaustion, drawing on experiences his educated acquaintances have never had. Learning changes what he can say and whom he can talk to. It also changes his judgment of the people whose approval first mattered so much.
The love story and the making of a writer belong to the same struggle. Ruth hopes to help Martin become a respectable man; Martin hopes that writing will make a life with her possible without surrendering his own. Between them stand ideas about class, useful work and acceptable art. The novel brings those ideas into drawing rooms, rented bedrooms and magazine offices, where a person's worth can depend on who is doing the judging.
The opening pages
CHAPTER II.
The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him. Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened him. They bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across which moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he would be careful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his mind upon it all the time.
He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur’s brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the members of this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them walking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his world were such displays of affection between parents and children made. It was a revelation of the heights of existence that were attained in the world above. It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His nature craved love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without, and hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he needed love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation, and thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman. Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have been too much for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child’s play compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed things at once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before, to handle strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing, to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him and being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying off in speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her. Also, when his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any one else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in any particular occasion, that person’s features were seized upon by his mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine what they were—all in relation to her. …
Chapter guides · 4
CHAPTER IX.
A Life Calculated in Words
Martin turns his experience into manuscripts and spends their imagined earnings before an editor has bought them.
From learning to writing
Eight months at sea have given Martin time to study grammar and Shakespeare. His wish to describe beauty to Ruth expands into a wish to write for strangers. Back in Oakland, he learns how to prepare a manuscript, revises his treasure-hunting article and begins a boys' adventure serial drawn from his own seafaring life. The same confidence that makes him work so quickly makes publication seem almost automatic.
Money on paper
His treasure-hunting article is not in Sunday's paper, as he had expected. When he finishes the serial, Martin calculates what its words will earn him, then imagines a servant for Gertrude and a bicycle for Marian. Those generous plans rest on prices he has read about, rather than money an editor has promised. His productivity is already real; the income remains an estimate.
Ruth's apprenticeship
His improved clothes and speech please Ruth, but his plan to become a writer troubles her. She compares writing with a trade that requires an apprenticeship and steers him toward school. Martin agrees to take the high-school examination on Monday. The chapter closes with her singing at the piano and his renewed wonder at her beauty: they are together again, while their ideas of his future still diverge.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Leaving the Laundry
Three months of exhausting work make escape more urgent than the wages that were meant to sustain Martin's writing.
The cause of the drinking
After his first drinking bout, Martin tries cycling to Oakland on Saturdays to keep himself sober. The long journeys add another burden to the laundry's relentless hours, and the binges return. By the end of three months, he recognizes the work as the cause and the drinking as its consequence. A job taken to finance his writing has consumed the strength he needs to write.
Two men resign
Joe also decides to leave. When Martin sends for a replacement, Joe insists that the telegram request two laundrymen. Martin plans to return to sea; Joe will take to the road. They spend their final days teaching the new men the job, while Joe refuses to resume the labor that has worn him down. Their departure grows out of shared experience, even though they choose different ways out.
A parting between friends
At Saturday's farewell, Joe urges Martin to join him and predicts they will meet again. Martin declines, but their affection survives the disagreement. Joe heads toward the water tank where he can board an empty freight train. The chapter leaves him setting out on the road, and Martin facing another separation between earning a living and making the life he wants.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Writing to Formula
Stories that sell briefly ease Martin's debts, while publication and payment prove to be separate events.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Truth at the Dinner Table
Intellectual fellowship strengthens Martin's confidence, but a quarrel in Ruth's home tests what that confidence costs.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Martin Eden?
- About 10 hr 15 min in total.
- How difficult is Martin Eden?
- Advanced. A long novel; about 10 hours of reading.
- Can I read Martin Eden for free?
- Martin Eden is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 4 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About London
Jack London was an American novelist and journalist whose adventure fiction drew on seafaring, labor, and the Klondike. His major novels repeatedly place human and animal life under environmental and social pressure.
“What remains when comfort and social protection fall away?”
London joins fast narrative momentum to hard questions about nature, violence, hierarchy, and adaptation.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Martin Eden is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.