The Iron Heel

At the tender age of fourteen, Jack London wrote about the lives of those workers, exploited six days a week, fifteen hours a day, for wages that were barely enough to survive on. This daily struggle and the books he consumed at the library (Mark Twain, Karl Marx, Darwin, Tolstoy, Hugo, Zola) helped Jack London to realise the importance of trade unions and socialist ideas. In The Iron Heel, a romantic and political novel, Jack London imagines a tyrannical regime, a blend of capitalism and fascism, to be the ruling class in America. This novel was praised by Leon Trotsky himself in a letter addressed to Jack London’s daughter.