Last Tuesday 12th of January, the American writer Jack London would complete 140 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. He was a pioneer in many areas: in publishing a literary magazine, in social activism and writing a dystopian novel. This post is a summary of five posts. The first was published https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London. The second was published https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel. The third was published at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/iron-m08.html. The fourth was published at http://www.enotes.com/topics/iron-heel/themes. The fifth was published at http://www.spikemagazine.com/0806-jack-london-iron-heel.php
Jack London (1876-1916) was born John Griffith Chaney. He was a novelist, journalist and social activist. A pioneer in the burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and large fortune from his fiction. Some of his most famous work include, The Call of the Wind and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories, An Odyssey of the North and Love of Live. He also wrote about South Pacific in such stories as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen. Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman was a music teacher and his father was the astrologer William Chaney, his father left his mother when he was born. Flora then married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran. In 1886 at the age of ten, he started to attend the Oakland Public Library, where he found a sympathetic librarian, who encouraged his learning. At the age of thirteen, he began to work in a cannery. In 1893, at seventeen, he signed on to the sealing schooner, bound for the coast of Japan. After the experience as a sailor, he returned to Oakland to attend high school. In 1897, when he was a student at the University of Californian Berkeley, London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney and Chaney responded that he could not be his father and he asserted that his mother had relations with other men and concluded by saying that he was more to be pitied than London. Jack London was devastated by his father's letter and with his own financial circumstances, he quit university and went to the Klondike during the gold rush boom with his sister's husband. After the experience as a miner, he concluded that his only hope was to get an education. He saw his writings as a business, his ticket out of poverty. London began his career just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom popular magazines and a strong market for short stories. He married Elizabeth Madden in 1900, they had two girls. In 1904, he accepted an assignment of the San Francisco Examiner to cover the Russo-Japanese War. After divorcing Elizabeth, London married Charmian Kittredge in 1905.
The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel, first published at 1908. Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern dystopian", it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the U.S. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying attention to tech changes. The book is unusual among London's writings ( and the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist. The iron Heel is cited by George orwell's biographer as having influenced Orwell's novel 1984. Another London's novel The Scarlet Plague (1912), and some of his short stories, are placed in a dystopian future setting that closely resembles that of The Iron Heel although there is no continuity of situations or characters. The Iron Heel predicts the rise of fascism emerging from a rotting capitalism, and the terrible implications of that for the working class and democratic leadership. The novel traces the rise of ruling class political organizations controlled by "the oligarghy", combined into a single entity that London vividly dubs "The Iron Heel", whose brutality is detailed throughout the novel. The story is written in a complex and unique way: The novel takes the form of a manuscript, originally composed by Avis Everhard, wife of Ernest Everhard, a revolutionary leader. To understand the social genesis of The Iron Heel, it is necessary to take some account of the decades preceding the First World War. Social, economic and military tensions find expressions in London's story. Perhaps the most interesting themes in The Iron Heel, however, is the importance of international solidarity among the workers and democracy advocates and opposition to explorative schemes.
After London's novel White Fang (1905) proved popular, he decided he could risk writing a novel he had long dreamed of undertaking: a political novel. Yet, London's book is not only a socialist proletarian novel but also a futurology it purpose to predict the future of the U.S. Indeed, Robert Spiller called London's novel " a terrifying forecast of fascism and its evils". Much of the novel is founded on the history of the U.S. The novel opens in Chicago, in 1866, the Haymarket Square Riot occurred when amid labor's drive for an eight-hour day, a demonstration by anarchists was staged in the square, where about 1,500 people were gathered. When police attempted to disperse the crowd, a bomb was exploded, killing eleven persons and injuring more than a hundred. The London's novel is thus grounded in the class distinctions, violence, poverty and labor strife of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. The welfare of the masses was dependent on the owners and managers of the trusts. The Iron Heel is a cautionary tale of the even darker future to which the author believed such naked capitalism would lead.
When it comes to accolades for the most lauded prophetic dystopian novel of the early 20th century, there is no doubting which are the two big. The all-surveillance paranoid nightmare of Orwell's 1984, and the distorted DNA playground of Huxley's Brave New World. Ocassionally Yevgeny Zamyarin's We get a look-in, a minor precursor to both, appearing as it did in 1920, long before that of Huxley (1932) and Orwell (1949). There is one however which always gets passed over, despite being written before both the others, way back in 1908, and overlooked, despite being written by one of the most widely revered American authors of all time. That novel is Jack London's The Iron Heel. The action of the book begins in the years immediately following when it was written. Labour relations in the U.S. are plunging as rapidly as the economy, while the thuggery of big-business against the unions increases in turn. Poverty spreads apace, and slower but just as surely does the socialism movement. The novel's narrative skilfully shifts focus from the small scale to the large and back again, the snapshots of poverty signifying the minutiae of the bigger vista. We see as the dictatorship takes hold it foes so steadily, creepily. The insidious little signs, the silence and ostracizing of academics, the blackening of the names of campaigners, are shown as Avis's father is hounded from his job, and a reformed priest the family know is hounded into a mental institution. The story continues and the Iron Heel kicks in. Congress is suspended, dissenters are machine-gunned. Scenes of conflict on a gargantuan scale ensue, interspersed with the individual intrigues within.
