Martin Eden
A sailor teaches himself to write, submits stories for years, is rejected, and then becomes famous. London based the novel on his own apprenticeship, and it is both a celebration of self-education and a bitter account of what success costs.
The last third is a sustained attack on the literary market and on the socialists and editors who claim to admire him. Martin's disillusion is not romantic; it is described with the precision of someone who had been through it. The ending is one of the bleakest in American fiction.
Public-domain status
First published in 1909. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Jack London died in 1916, so this work has been free to republish there since 1987.
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