The Iron Heel

By Jack London

Categories: Literature & Fiction

The Iron Heel is a 1908 novel by the American writer Jack London, often considered the first modern dystopian novel and an influence on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Presented as a manuscript written by Avis Everhard and discovered centuries later, it tells of her husband, the socialist leader Ernest Everhard, and the rise of a brutal American oligarchy, the Iron Heel, which crushes opposition through violence, surveillance and propaganda, anticipating the rise of fascism in the twentieth century.

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• Margaret Atwood: “These are some of the books I have read and enjoyed. … The old original; perhaps the first twentieth-century dystopia. … Inspired 1984.”