Martin Eden
1909
Martin Eden is Jack London at his most raw and personal. A rough-hewn sailor from the slums of San Francisco decides, almost against his own nature, that he will become a gentleman and a great writer. His driving force: Ruth Morse, a refined资产阶级 woman whose world represents everything Martin desperately wants to enter. Through relentless self-education, brutal rejection letters, and mounting isolation, Martin claws his way toward everything he desires, only to discover that victory tastes like ash. This semiautobiographical novel dissects the American dream with unsettling precision: the hunger for acceptance, the cost of ambition, the gap between what we build and what we actually want. It remains essential for anyone who has ever wanted something so badly it destroyed them.
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“But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind””
— Jack London
“limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.””
— Jack London
“Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?””
— Jack London
“He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.””
— Jack London
“Every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.””
— Jack London
“The more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only twenty-four hours long became a chronic complaint with him.””
— Jack London
“Why didn’t you dare it before? he asked harshly.When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That’s the question. I’ve been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me?””
— Jack London
“Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for”
— Jack London
“Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon publication and public notice ? It would seem so.””
— Jack London
