One of my all-time favorite books is “Martin Eden” by Jack London, which is a very different work from some of his other books like White Fang. Martin Eden is a blue-collar tough guy, a sailor, a street-fighter and a sometime gang member. When he meets and falls in love with an upper-middle-class girl named Ruth, he falls for her completely, but he doesn't realize it's not really her he loves. He loves her apparent refinement and veneer of education, because Martin is actually extremely intelligent and inside himself he recognizes that he wants to have what he thinks she has.

Applying his formidable mental powers to the task of making himself her equal, he actually shoots way past her. Ruth is nowhere near being his intellectual equal, and her views are as narrow and materialistic as one would expect from her upbringing. When Martin is slandered as a socialist revolutionary, she breaks off their engagement- not because she doesn't love him, but because he's not “respectable.”

The irony, for Martin, is that he's not a socialist at all. He's a hard-minded “every man for himself” Social Darwinist, and he despises socialism. When he writes his first best-seller, he quickly becomes a literary celebrity, but with neither love nor principle to sustain him, it all means nothing.

I won't tell you how the book ends, but you shouldn't take the Social Darwinist philosophy in it too literally. Jack London himself was a committed socialist, and he wrote the book to expose the tragedy of pure individualism. The lone wolf, no matter how brilliant he may be, ultimately has nothing to live for. Martin Eden is a tragic hero.