In the Library
Martin Eden
Jack London, 1909
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 46
- Length
- Length 139k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie does the same thing, but reverses the arc: a poor striver claws upward into the same discontented emptiness after arriving.
£1.99
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage does the same thing, but through a clubfooted medical student chasing knowledge and a woman who will not love him back.
£1.99
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby does the same thing, but through a bootlegger who reinvents himself for a woman who was never worth the climb.
£1.99
About the book
In a rented room in Oakland, an alarm clock is set for five hours of sleep, and it is the most hopeful object in the book. Martin Eden is a sailor with scarred knuckles and no grammar who is asked to dinner in a well-off house, sees a pale girl and a shelf of Swinburne, and decides to make himself worthy of both. What follows is the most exact account anyone has written of hunger for a mind: the borrowed dictionary, the pawned bicycle, the rejection slips arriving like weather, the laundry job whose steam burns the sentences out of him before he can get home to them. Then the world turns and gives him everything at once, praising the very manuscripts it had sent back, and Jack London, who climbed the same ladder from the same waterfront, lets him find out what is waiting at the top. Success arrives; the wanting does not survive it. Underneath every page, patient, is the Pacific that raised him.