Nevertheless, in the copy of the novel which he inscribed for Upton Sinclair, London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero).

"[4] Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite.

Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background[5] and the Morses are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of wealth and refinement.

By the time Eden attains the favor of the publishers and the bourgeoisie who had shunned him, he has already developed a grudge against them and become jaded by toil and unrequited love.

Instead of enjoying his success, he retreats into a quiet indifference, interrupted only to rail mentally against the gentility of bourgeois society or to donate his new wealth to working-class friends and family.

A former sailor from a working-class background, who falls in love with the young, bourgeois Ruth and educates himself to become a writer, aiming to win her hand in marriage.

Initially, while Eden strives for education and culture, Lizzie's rough hands make her seem inferior to Ruth in his eyes.

Joe, who likes the hobo life, except for the lack of girls, eventually accepts the offer and promises to treat the employees fairly.

Paul Berman comments that Eden cannot reconcile his "civilized and clean" self with the "fistfighting barbarian" of the past, and that this inability causes his descent into a delirious ambivalence.

Martin Eden embraces the concept of "henidical mental processes", coined by Otto Weininger in his 1903 work, Geschlecht und Charakter.

When he finally achieves literary success, Eden sets up his friends with machinery of their own, and Lizzie tells him, "Something's wrong with your think-machine."

London made suicide a prevalent subject in the book as Eden's mentor and one of his closest friends, Russ Brissenden, takes his own life.

[8] When London wrote Martin Eden at age 33, he had already achieved international acclaim with The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf and White Fang.

London responded in a public letter.I wrote Martin Eden, not as an autobiography, nor as a parable or what dire end awaits an unbeliever in God, but as an indictment of that pleasant, wild-beast struggle of individualism.