The Iron Heel

Presented as a manuscript discovered seven centuries in the future, this novel tells the story of Ernest Everhard, a powerful socialist leader in the America of the early twentieth century, through the memoir of his wife, Avis. As he challenges the rich in debate after debate, an oligarchy of giant trusts, the Iron Heel, seizes control of the country, crushing unions, farmers and the middle class, and the resistance is driven underground into a long and bloody struggle.

Jack London published the book in 1908, and it is often called one of the first modern dystopian novels; George Orwell admired its prediction of how a ruling class might use violence to keep power. It shows a very different side of the author of The Call of the Wild and Martin Eden. See his life.

Jack London (1876–1916) grew up poor in San Francisco and Oakland and lived a life as wild as his books: an oyster pirate at fifteen, a sailor on a sealing ship to Japan, a tramp, a socialist agitator and a gold seeker in the Klondike in 1897, where he caught scurvy and gathered material for a lifetime.

The Call of the Wild made him famous in 1903, and he became one of the best-paid writers of his day, producing White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden among more than fifty books. He died on his California ranch at forty.