Martin Eden is the tale of a sailor who educates himself.
Eden has a wicked crush on college-educated society girl Ruth Morse, and thinks that he can get her by becoming one of the literati . . . we all know what happens in that story, don't we? He loses his fiancée, of course (he's not well "established" enough for her). But Martin finds fame and fortune in the end -- and of course that gets the girl's attention -- as if he'd want it! Oh, complication.
The character of Eden differs from London in that Eden rejects socialism, attacking it as "slave morality" and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. In a note to Upton Sinclair, he wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."