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The Iron Heel Paperback – December 19, 2019

by Jack London (Author)
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 339 ratings
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The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern dystopian" fiction, it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. In The Iron Heel, Jack London's socialist views are explicitly on display.
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  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 339 ratings

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  1. Jack London

    Jack London

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    John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

    Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in 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 of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

    London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.

    Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by published by L C Page and Company Boston 1903 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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  2. rojas soledad

    rojas soledad

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    We are a company specialized in bringing you the best classics of universal literature of all time, in our profile you will find all the books you are looking for, adventures, fiction, fantasy, science fiction, stories, children's stories, novels, biographies, history, psychology, adventures, and much more….

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3.9 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

Ivan's choice
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful foresight from London
Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2019
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This 2006 edition of Jack London's sci-fi work is most wonderful and well deserves a critical examination. Unlike other utopian or dystopian fictions, this story is presented as a fictionalized witness account of an unfinished manuscript, with later annotations from a fictionalized editor across the space of 700 years in the future. Such temporal construction is very special in such genre.
Infiltration, espionage, analysis on political power, political theorizing, fictionalized biography, they are all in this wonderful story that the author prophesies that would happen to a modern society that the power of labor is on the rise and the oligarchs trying to contain the radical power from below.
This is the first my first Jack London story and I am very pleased with the wonderful dimension the story opens up for readers.
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Erik Bloom
4.0 out of 5 stars Jack London's Socialist Fantasy
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2012
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Jack London (1876-1916) is best known for writing fiction for young adults focusing on life in the frontier, such as  The Call of the Wild . However, he was also an ardent socialist and wrote Iron Heel as his dream of what a socialist revolution might look like. Iron Heel, which was written in 1908, is also one of the first examples of dystopian fiction that probably influenced later authors as they wrote their dystopian future histories. I like to think about it as the "grandfather" of dystopian novels, along with  We (Modern Library Classics) .

The novel is the memoires of Avis Everhard and focuses on the exploits of her husband, Ernest Everhard during the start of the socialist revolution in America and the establishment of the authoritarian regime, the Iron Heel. Avis' manuscript is discovered by historians six hundred years in the future and of the novel's most entertaining features are the various footnotes with historical commentary on the revolution and its ultimate victory.

Ernest himself is an ideal man. He is a self-educated working class philosopher who never loses an intellectual argument and who is always right in his predictions...as confirmed by his wife and the footnotes. Although Ernest is an ardent socialist, he is also compassionate man who does much to help the poor and downtrodden.

The story is fast-paced and centers around the collapse of the United States as we know it and its replacement by the Iron Heel, a government run by and for large capitalists. The Iron Heel engages in a brutal war against the working class--both through "divide and conquer" techniques and brutal warfare. It is an easy book to read with a good mix of argument and action (Ayn Rand could have learned a lot from London's style!). One annoying feature of the novel is that Ernest is perhaps too perfect and his opponents are too much of straw men.

Some readers commented on how right London is on his prediction that the oligarchy has taken over politics. There is nothing really prophetic about this novel as it is built around a failed and incorrect economic theory. As an economist, I have to object to the underlying Marxist theories of economy. Marx (and through him, London) did not allow for technological change (or productivity gains) that has turned the economy from a zero-sum game to a growing pie. While there is certainly room to fight over who gets what share, the picture is not as bleak as Marx imagined.

Likewise, economic evolution does not seem to move in one direction and the winners and losers are constantly changing--Facebook did not exist ten years and Microsoft and Apple did not exist thirty years ago. US Steel today is a footnote. Finally, while conspiracies do exist, they are hard to maintain. While it might be in the interest of all "oligarchs" to act in one way, it is unlikely that they will do so.

Interestingly, I think that today the novels like Iron Heel tend to be written more about a leftist state running amok and trampling individual freedom (once again, Ayn Rand) than right-wings oligarchies doing the same.

For me, Iron Heel is well written and entertaining novel. Although I don't subscribe to the socialist doctrine underlying the novel, it is still well worth it.
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Michael Valdivielso
3.0 out of 5 stars The Iron Heel Vs. The Iron Heart
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2006
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The book has a simple idea behind it. The story is treated like a manuscript written by Avis Everhard, the wife to Ernest Everhard the American Revolutionary. Written in the early 20th Century is if found seven centuries later.

Jack London's insight in the workings of how those who have power keep it is amazing. The street fighting, the bombings, the use of military force, all happened in one form or another in the years following the book's publication in 1907. Before Facism, before thw world wars, he sees a class struggle for control of our machine civilization (a term other authors will pick up) and his vision is very, very crisp.

I find the fact that the American Oligarchy had a jail in Cuba kind of ironic. And that one of their great wonder cities, the one called Asgard, was completed in 1984 to be kind of funny in a way.

But Jack's picture of a socialist revolt and maybe future society is not very pleasing to the eye. As the conflict grows both sides become ruthless, heartless, clones of each other. They kill, bomb, spy and use people. They both use the lower class, those poor folks in the abyss, the very ones the socialists are trying to save.

In the fighting in Chicago Avis sometimes can't tell the difference between those comardes fighting on her side and the soldiers fighting for the government. When she sights a wounded man, a man from the bottom of the class system, a beast so low that he knows he will recieve no help from anybody, she does not even OFFER to help. Many of the female socialists, bomb tossing terrorists, refuse to have children because it would take them away from fighting for the cause. In other words having a family gets in the way of killing people. No wonder it took them three centuries to overthrow the Iron Heel.

The fact is both sides want the same thing - to rule the planet. By the end of the book I was not really cheering on either group. Also much of the book, when there isn't any action, is one large boring lecture.

In the end it was worth reading because of my interest in dystopia fiction but that is it.
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jeb
5.0 out of 5 stars whats happening
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2011
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I first read The Iron Heel when I was 24 and in Prison. It was at the time to me one more and only another of a long line of distopian novels, like 1984, Brave New World and Animal Farm. 34 years later it looks to me like Jack London was prescient. The concentration of disproportonate wealth in amerika is 3 x what it was in the 70's. The Rich do what they want, own the Govt and Industry, and grind the poor unemployed masses into the earth. The analysis of the classes with the economic mode London employed in his book is similar to current socialist economists such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Krugman, and I would recommend anyone with a social conscience to read this, as it is a scathing review of amerika today written a century ago by a fabled socialist. We can only hope that the outcome is similar.
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Arup sarkar
5.0 out of 5 stars Very very thought provoking
Reviewed in India on March 2, 2024
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Daffy Bibliophile
5.0 out of 5 stars Could have been written today...
Reviewed in Canada on June 23, 2014
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The blurb on the back of this book states: "'The Iron Heel' tells the story of a wealthy class that squeezes out the middle class..", so it's no surprise that as I was reading this novel I felt like Jack London was a very prophetic writer! What London wrote about in 1908 - a class of wealthy oligarchs using their control of government to destroy all opposition - reads a lot like the headlines from today. True, London describes open warfare between the workers and the wealthy; but large corporations destroying small business (think Walmart) thus destroying capitalism itself and corporate control of public opinion through the control of the media echo right out of today's headlines. Having finished the book I felt like we'd lost so much since the heyday of the middle class from the 1950s through to the 1970s. The middle class in North America is under attack, wages are stagnant or falling and the wealthy are consolidating their control of politicians and the machinery of government, just like in this book.
It's a pity that "The Iron Heel" can't be seen simply as fiction but anyone who has paid attention to the news over the last few decades can't help but be struck by the similarity between the novel and the news.
"The Iron Heel" is a great read and it's too bad that it hasn't received the same attention as Jack London's novels about the Klondike. Read this book and then sit back and ask yourself if London was really that far off in his description of who really runs society, then and now.
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Pasquier Marie-Claire
5.0 out of 5 stars le talon de fer
Reviewed in France on November 6, 2015
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Ce roman d'anticipation, publié en 1908, est un document précieux sur le socialisme aux Etats-Unis à l'aube du XXe siècle. Il va bientôt paraître dans la Pléiade (deux volumes consacrés à Jack London) dans une nouvelle traduction. Le "talon de fer", c'est l'oligarchie dénoncée par la narratrice dans un document découvert plusieurs siècles plus tard et annoté par un historien fictif.
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Luc REYNAERT
5.0 out of 5 stars The iron heel of oligarchy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 11, 2006
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Jack London's story paints the dark days of pure capitalism where `children, six and seven years of age, working every night at twelve hours shift', where the people of the abyss live like beasts in great squalid labor-ghettos and where `my father lied, stole and did all sorts of dishonorable things to put bread in my mouth.'

In pure Marxist style, a tiny Plutocracy (seven powerful groups) has taken hold of all powers in the US. It has at its beck and call the police, the army, the courts, the schools and private militias. The press became `suppresssage'. Its policy is to print nothing that is a vital menace to the established and to mould public opinion.

The Church is also their mouthpiece: `the command to the Church was `Feed my lambs', but out of the dividends magnificent churches are built where your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, full-bellied recipients of those dividends.' When one of its ministers speaks out for the poor, he is put in an asylum for being `insane'.

In order to keep control of the proletarians, the Plutocrats force a split in the unions between the strong unions in the monopoly corporations and the rest of weakly organized labor.

Another means of control is terrorism and `agents provocateurs' whose bloody attacks are foisted on the shoulders of their enemies.

The only opposition to the rule of the oligarchs consists of the `Brotherhood of Man', a socialist semi-clandestine organization.

A Marxian capitalistic endgame explodes with a bloody war between the few and the many ...

This forceful revolutionary book is brushed in an idealistic tone, with rather naïve black and white (the good and the bad) colors.

Unfortunately, it is partly still very topical. The struggle between right and left in the US became the global struggle between North and South. Terrorism, control of the media, the influence of education and religion, control of the courts are still red hot topics today.

This book is a real find. Not to be missed.
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Mr. C. Doughty
4.0 out of 5 stars small very small writing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 3, 2021
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fast service great condition but the writing is very small
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