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

This book is a favorite among writers, who relate to Martin Eden’s speculation that when he mailed off a manuscript, ‘there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps, ’ returning it automatically with a rejection slip.[citation needed] The central theme of Martin Eden’s developing artistic sensibilities puts the novel in tradition of the Kunstlerroman genre, in whici is narrated the formation and development of an artist.( wikipedia.org)