ABSTRACT
In an American history class in high school in the year the author read the Manifesto and they wrote a Marxist-inspired essay on the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, they said, did not only aim to provide "hemispheric protection and solidarity", as that high-sounding phrase would have it. The doctrine, they wrote, was a masked effort by rising American bourgeoisie to secure a huge potential market without European intervention. Martin Eden is a semi-autobiographical novel. The hero, a poor, ignorant young sailor, has a yearning and, as it turns out, a gift for writing, and sets out to educate himself. He is encouraged in this endeavor by a young bourgeois woman who finds him attractive but wants to "smooth out" the roughness of his manners and outlook. Lackawanna is a working-class suburb of Buffalo that housed the huge, clanging Bethlehem and Republic Steel mills. Most of the people who lived there had their origins in Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland.
