The People of the Abyss / The Road / The Iron Heel / Martin Eden / John Barleycorn

By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises inThe People of the Abyssto italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero ofThe Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of Londons own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled Revolution. Londons prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that whenThe Iron Heelfirst appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.

Whether he is recollecting, inThe Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, inMartin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoirJohn Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it.

Though he is outraged inThe People of the Abyssby the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward,The Call of the Wild(in the companion volume,Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery.The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes Londons warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force.