We can say that Jack London (1876–1916) became a writer, overcoming family fate. Unrecognized by his father even before birth, as a teenager he was an “oyster pirate,” a tramp, a prisoner, a “socialist boy,” and participated in revolutionary marches along the roads of America. Later he sought his fortune in the gold-bearing Klondike, mastered writing, traveled through the States giving lectures on socialism... Jack London lived a truly superhuman life. Over the course of 16 years of literary activity, he wrote 50 books and became world-famous. More than one generation of youth on both sides of the ocean forged the character of his novel “Martin Eden.” The three great illusions of the 20th century - marriage on a reasonable basis, socialism as universal equality and the theory of the superman - Jack London materialized on himself. “Reasonable marriage” took revenge on him by alienating his daughters, socialism by setting fire to his “bourgeois” “House of the Wolf”, and he himself parted with the third illusion. Andrey Tanaseichuk revises and “worldliness” many established romantic ideas about Jack London - and in this the book is polemical, but it makes it possible to form a personal opinion about the great writer.