The Book That Saw It All Coming

When Jack London published The Iron Heel in 1908 he was already famous and wealthy from The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf and a dozen other books that had made him one of the highest-paid and most widely read authors in America. He didn't need to write The Iron Heel. It wasn’t going to make him more popular or make him more money. In fact, several people in his life told him not to publish it.

But in typical Jack London form, he published it anyway.

What London had written was not a novel in any comfortable sense. It is narrated as a manuscript—the memoir of Avis Everhard, wife of a revolutionary socialist named Ernest Everhard—discovered and annotated by a scholar seven centuries in the future, long after the events it describes have passed into history. Ernest Everhard, in the early twentieth century of the novel, watches American democracy dismantle itself from the inside as a consortium of mega-corporations—the Oligarchy, which Everhard names the Iron Heel—systematically purchases the judiciary, the legislature, the press, and the church, and then, when purchase is insufficient, simply crushes what remains beneath the organized weight of private armies and economic strangulation.

London wrote this in 1907. He was writing about the events of 1907. But he just as easily could have been describing modern day global politics.

Considered the first modern dystopian novel in the English language, predating We by thirteen years, Brave New World by twenty-four, and 1984 by forty-one, London invented the form that Zamyatin refined, Huxley elegantly furnished, and Orwell immortalized. The architectural credit belongs here, in a book most people haven't read, written by a man most people know only for dog stories and adventure novels set in the Yukon tundra.

What makes The Iron Heel stranger and more uncomfortable than its successors is that it doesn't take place in an imaginary future state with an invented name. It takes place in America. The corporations have American names. The politicians are recognizable American types. The mechanisms of democratic erosion he describes—the consolidation of media, the capture of courts, the weaponization of economic uncertainty, the replacement of public discourse with manufactured fear—are not invented. They were observations of the time made by one of the more astute writers in American history. London was a socialist, a passionate and sometimes contradictory one, and he brought an ideologue's fury and a journalist's eye to the page simultaneously.

Whether that makes the novel feel prescient or polemical depends largely on when you're reading it and what you're watching on the news.

London finished The Iron Heel during a period of intense personal turmoil—he was in the middle of a divorce, building his famous Wolf House estate in Sonoma that would later burn to the ground before he ever slept in it, and managing a ranch, a sailing voyage, and a drinking problem with the same relentless energy he applied to everything. He wrote with extraordinary speed and volume his entire life, producing more than fifty books in under twenty years, and The Iron Heel, which required genuine structural sophistication and sustained political argument, was produced in the same furious current as everything else. The annotated manuscript device—the future scholar's footnotes contextualizing Avis Everhard's account—is a genuinely complex narrative invention that London deployed almost casually, as if it cost him nothing.

Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary hero at the novel's center, is not a subtle self-portrait. He is physically powerful, intellectually dominant, rhetorically unstoppable, and morally certain. London gave his hero his own first name as a middle name. He was writing the revolution he wished he was leading, through a character he wished he was, in a book he knew most of his readers didn't want.