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.