Martin Eden

Martin Eden, semiautobiographical novel by Jack London, published in 1909. The title character becomes a writer, hoping to acquire the respectability sought by his society-girl sweetheart. She spurns him, however, when his writing is rejected by several magazines and when he is falsely accused of being a socialist. She tries to win him back after he achieves fame, but Eden realizes her love is false. Financially successful and robbed of connection to his own class, aware that his quest for bourgeois respectability was hollow, and devastated by the suicide of his mentor, Eden travels to the South Seas, where he jumps from the ship and drowns.