第4章 Jack London

Jack London(12 January 1876-22 November 22,1916)was an American author,journalist,and social activist.He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang,both set in the Klondike Gold Rush,as well as the short stories"To Build a Fire","An Odyssey of the North",and"Love of Life".He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as"The Pearls of Parlay"and"The Heathen",and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

Martin Eden is a 1909 novel about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer.It was first serialized in the Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909 and published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909.

Eden represents writers'frustration with publishers by speculating that when he mails off a manuscript,a"cunning arrangement of cogs"immediately puts it in a new envelope and returns it automatically with a rejection slip.The central theme of Eden's developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman,in which is narrated the formation and development of an artist.