Martin Eden

Published in 1909 by MacMillan, Martin Eden is one of London's few novels that strays outside his normal settings. The eponymous character is a self-educated writer with strong Nietzchean tendencies, striving for the individual not the masses – in opposition to London's socialist views – who in time loses his fiancé through lack of success. When it does arrive and he gets his work published Eden, has long since lost any sympathy for his audience and his working class of which he was formally a part. But in losing these sympathies and in spurning his former fiancé who tried to win him back, Eden realises his achievements have been hollow and he decides instead to go back to the seas as the sailor he once was.