About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherLibrary of America, T.H.E.

ISBN-100940450062

ISBN-139780940450066

eBay Product ID (ePID)1027505

Product Key Features

Book TitleJack London: Novels and Social Writings (LOA #7) : The People of the Abyss / the Road / the Iron Heel / Martin Eden / John Barleycorn / Selected Essays

Number of Pages1192 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year1982

TopicAmerican / General, Literary, Political

GenreFiction, Literary Collections

AuthorJack. London

Book SeriesLibrary of America Jack London Edition Ser.

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.5 in

Item Weight26.3 Oz

Item Length8.1 in

Item Width5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN82-006940

Grade FromTwelfth Grade

Series Volume Number2

SynopsisBy 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 in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel , an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London's own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled "Revolution." London's prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first 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, in The Road , the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin 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 memoir John 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 in The People of the Abyss by 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 London's warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

LC Classification NumberPR6023.E15