Martin Eden is a tale about a young sailor struggling to become a writer. Eden is trying to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation at first is his love for Ruth Morse. Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class background and the Morse's are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of knowledge and refinement.
