Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London's The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. What begins as a war of words ends in scenes of h...

Like the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they conftont the merciless frozen expanses of the north. Yet London breaks free of stereotypical figures and one-dimensional plots to explore deeper psychological and social questions of self-mastery, masculinity, and racial domination. The uneasy relationship between the Native Americans and whites lies at the heart of many of the stories, while...

When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more signifi...

Dark Borders connects anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in midcentury America to the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir. Jonathan Auerbach provides in-depth interpretations of more than a dozen of these dark crime thrillers, considering them in relation to U.S. national security measures enacted from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The growth of a domestic intelligence-gathering apparatus before, during, and after the Second World War raised unsett...

How and why did public opinion—long cherished as a foundation of democratic government—become an increasing source of concern for American Progressives?Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process “the manufacture of consen...

In the year 2073, an old man named James Howard Smith wanders a wild, depopulated California with his grandsons — the last living witness to the Scarlet Death, a plague that wiped out nearly all of humanity in a matter of days back in 2013. Jack London's The Scarlet Plague imagines civilization's total collapse decades before pandemic fiction became a genre: skyscrapers reclaimed by forest, grandchildren who can't read, and one survivor determined to pass down the memory of the world that ...

The Jacket is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United States as The Star Rover). It is a story of reincarnation.A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole...

London's first novel introduces the strong, independent, well-educated heroine that would run through much of his work. Frona Welse, Jack London's feminine ideal, returns to the desolate north of Canada and meets Vance Corliss. An adventure novel of the first order.

Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, first published by Duckworth & Co. in 1919, is a richly observed novel of love, work, inheritance, and intellectual self-fashioning in Edwardian London. More traditional in form than her later modernist masterpieces, it nevertheless reveals Woolf's acute psychological insight and social intelligence. Through Katharine Hilbery, Mary Datchet, Ralph Denham, and William Rodney, the novel examines marriage, female independence, class expectations, and the competi...

The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it.

A masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future, and the inspiration for the blockbuster film Blade RunnerBy 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They’ve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive andr...

Slaughterhouse-Five is an American classic and one of the greatest antiwar novels ever written. Following Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time from World War II to the firebombing of Dresden and beyond, it asks what it means to be human in a world that keeps ending. Kurt Vonnegut blends science fiction, satire, and autobiography with dark humor and the famous refrain: So it goes. This is not a story about heroes. It is a story about children.