Martin Eden is a young, uneducated and impoverished sailor and seemingly destined to struggle with whatever paltry earnings he could gain from the physical labor and toil that would keep him in the slums of Oakland the rest of his days. That is until he meets and is immediately smitten with Ruth Morse, a young woman deeply entrenched in San Francisco’s turn of the century, bourgeois society class. In order to gain Ruth’s affection, Martin is determined to educate himself, learn proper etiquette, and abandon the life of the sea in pursuit of his dreams - to be a writer.
Ruth agrees to help him on his journey of change, and somewhere along the way, she falls in love with Martin, at the great displeasure of her powerful and controlling mother. When Martin eventually achieves his long sought after fame as a published author, he realizes that success is not everything he imagined it would be.
This classic story, faithfully adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London, has much to say about human ambition, individualism and social issues not only for the period in which this story is set, but also for the direction America is going, even today.
When Martin Eden was adapted as a miniseries by an Italian production company in the 1970’s, it was hugely popular in Europe, particularly in France, Germany and Russia.
