The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is a 1908 dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, combining political fiction with science fiction elements. It depicts the rise of a socialist labor movement in the United States and the brutal oligarchic dictatorship that conservative interests establish to crush it. The novel is framed as a manuscript written by the narrator, Avis Everhard, discovered centuries later and annotated by a future historian, and follows her transformation from a sheltered skeptic into a committed revolutionary as she witnesses the oligarchy consolidate power through a favored labor caste and private armies.