In Martin Eden, the United States is more than a geographic setting: it becomes the subject of Martin’s attack on class power and the arena in which his literary fortunes change. The republic he describes has exchanged one form of mastery for another, while the American publishing and press systems surrounding him first withhold recognition and later turn him into a public figure.

The Republic in Martin’s Argument

During a socialist meeting, an audience member challenges Martin’s claim about slave societies by asking how it applies to the United States. Martin answers by recasting the country’s founding as a transfer of power rather than the end of domination. In his account, the thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed a republic, but people could not live without masters; sword-wielding rulers gave way to traders and money-lenders who exercised power through concealed economic and political influence.

Martin’s language is deliberately incendiary. He accuses these new masters of buying judges, corrupting legislatures, and subjecting children to labor. He claims that two million children toil in the country and that ten million people are inadequately housed and fed. These figures belong to his speech and its polemical indictment, not to an independent account supplied by the narration. His central contention is that a society built on enslavement cannot endure because it suppresses development, and he challenges his opponents to identify a different law that could sustain such a society.

The American Literary Marketplace

The United States also supplies the commercial landscape through which Martin tries to earn a living as a writer. After repeated refusals, Singletree, Darnley & Co. accepts The Shame of the Sun but warns him that books of its kind rarely repay their costs and doubts it will sell a thousand copies. Martin calculates that a thousand sales at a dollar each, with a fifteen-percent royalty, would yield $150. He offers to sell his rights for $100, but the firm declines to take the risk.

His experience with magazines gives him a contrasting measure of the market. The Millennium had paid him twice as much for Adventure, a work one-quarter the length of the book, and four cents a word. Martin concludes that first-class magazines pay well, though they do not pay on acceptance. As later stories are accepted and paid for, he opens a bank account and, for the first time, has several hundred dollars and no debts. When the Meredith-Lowell Company accepts Overdue, he asks for a $500 advance, remembering the five dollars Gertrude had once given him; the company sends the check and a contract by return mail. These reversals make the national literary economy tangible through the sums it withholds, offers, and finally places in his hands.

Oakland, Publicity, and Recognition

Oakland is the local point from which Martin’s reputation enters public circulation. When newspapers begin asking who he is, he has refused to provide biographical information to publishers, but reporters seek out people in his hometown and assemble accounts of his life, including things he had done and things he had not. A local photographer supplies pictures after marketing a photograph he had previously taken of Martin and copyrighted. The episode shows publicity building a public identity from material Martin neither controls nor wholly recognizes as true.

At first Martin resists exposure, disgusted with the magazines and bourgeois society. He eventually permits interviews, gives opinions on literature and philosophy, and accepts invitations from the bourgeoisie. With his writing and study no longer occupying his days, he yields partly because it is easier to do so; his growing indifference also makes publicity less worth fighting. He even grants a full-page interview to the cub reporter who had portrayed him as a red-shirt and a socialist. The United States thus appears not only as the object of his political critique but as a society whose commercial and media institutions can reject a writer, publicize him, and recast him as a celebrity.