Martin Eden

Rating:
Summary: A ageless story of literary triumph and tragedy.
Review: As an individual ages from adolesence to retirement age, Martin Eden and other works of Jack London, though unchanged from the original printing, bring different meaning and worth to the individual. Jack London and other great authors of the period such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, share unparalleled triumph in their individual genre and a shared tragic consequence of death. As a teenager, Martin Eden served as that triumphant underdog that nestles in many teenagers of some 50 years ago. Yet those teenagers, many of who grew up before, during and after World War II, have come to know personal tragedy. The tragedy of Martin Eden (autobiographically speaking)takes on more of reality to those past generations than perhaps the present generation. Nevertheless, the story is timeless albeit bittersweet. Martin Eden could well serve as a primer for those individuals who have yet to read his more classical tales of Sea Witch and Call of the Wild. Those were raw boned and sometimes brutal times he described. A reader may be surprised at the reality in the novels but should accept there is more fact than fiction as Jack London did indeed experience or witness much of these tales

Rating:
Summary: Undoubtedly my favorite Jack London's book
Review: I have read several of Jack London's works and I consider this as my favourite. The struggle of the main charater (Martin) to get an education and become a writer is narrated so well by the author that I really had a hard time putting this book down. The plot is very simple: Martin Eden is a sailor who lives in Oakland California at the end of the ninteenth century. When he meet Ruth through her brother, he falls in love with her at once, eventhough she is a rich university student while he is an uneducated orphan that lives with his step sister and her husband. Martin deciedes to get an education so that he can get closer to Ruth. He starts to study grammar and to read heaps of books. eventually he decides to become a writer. The story of Martin striving to make it as a writer is very similar to that of London himself. The book is superbly written and a must read for struggling artists and also for lovers of good literature.

Rating:
Summary: illumination for sea wolf
Review: I loved "sea wolf" but didn't really understand why until I read Martin Eden a few weeks later; then instantly, at the unwanted ending of Martin Eden, I saw the dying of Wolf Larsen as the necessary end of a life of transformation. I can't think of this book without seeing the enforced slavery and punitive changes in the "second critic of America" on the sealing ship as an allegory for Jack London's own painful and wilful revolution into an author, and so as a variant of Martin Eden.

As Larsen and his first mate struggle for life on the deck of the derelict Ghost, it is a foregone conclusion that the writer and critic will triumph, since Wolf is really trying to kill himself and cannot, even after passing the best of himself and his knowledge and experience into these alien hands.
In "sea wolf" Jack London triumphs as a writer only by destroying his primitive self and uniting with a female alter ego. In Martin Eden, Jack shows that he really is only Wolf Larsen at heart, and cannot under any circumstances break away from his past without destroying himself.
Ah, some things are not worth their price.
Read these two books together, in any order, and preferrably in several orders to discover America and yourself, if you had to give up anything to grow up ...