The Iron Heel

Jack London, Matt Soar (Narrator)

Generally considered to be “the earliest of the modern Dystopian,” The Iron Heel chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London’s socialist views are most explicitly on display. London presents a fictional “Everhard Manuscript”, hidden and found centuries in the future. This book is a platform for him to espouse his socialist views and predict the collapse of capitalism. Very different from his other action novels, it envisions a future oligarchic tyranny in America and the rise of the Socialist party. The book has been credited with influencing George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

About the author

Jack London

John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
London was part of the radical literary group “The Crowd” in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.
His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life”. He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen”.

(Goodreads.com)