The Iron Heel

John Griffith “Jack” London was born in San Francisco in 1876 and grew up in the working class. As a youth, he worked various jobs in a cannery, jute mill, and power plant that were formative in his development as a socialist writer and activist. As an older, returning high school student in Oakland, California, he published political essays in the Oakland High School magazine, The Aegis, and earned the nickname “the boy Socialist of Oakland” in The San Francisco Chronicle. London joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1896 and delivered impassioned speeches in the Oakland City Hall park. He was a member of the radical literary group The Crowd, which formed in 1898, and he ran for mayor of Oakland in 1901 and 1905 as a member of the Socialist Party. In 1903, he published his firsthand account of poverty in the East End of London in the book The People of the Abyss. London moved to Sonoma County in 1905 and delivered lectures titled “The Coming Crisis” and “Revolution” throughout the country. 

London mirrors his personal biography in the character of Ernest Everhard, the protagonist and author surrogate of The Iron Heel. Like London, Ernest is an active member of the Socialist Party and is discovered by Dr. Cunningham while delivering provocative speeches in the streets. In Chapter 5, portions of Ernest’s fierce speech to the Philomath Club, a gathering of captains of industry, is taken verbatim from London’s 1905-1906 lecture “Revolution.” The novel also makes significant references to the working class as “people of the abyss.” The refuge in Sonoma County where Avis and Ernest hide out is an allusion to Beauty Ranch, London’s property in Glen Ellen, California, where he lived from 1905 until his death in 1916. Ernest serves as a mouthpiece for London’s political views, and the first half of the novel is comprised of what Avis calls his “Working-class Philosophy” (27). Avis frequently refers to her husband’s evocative speeches as a “clarion-call” for class consciousness and revolution (8, 23, 61), which echoes London’s commitment to the socialist cause. The character of Avis may also be modeled on London’s second wife, Charmian Kittridge London, whom he married in 1905.