Jack London’s _The Iron Heel_ (1908) is unique for three reasons. It is one of the first relatively modern American novels which preaches Marxism, warns against Fascism, and is set in the future. Set in the twenty-seventh century, four hundred years after the Brotherhood of Man had overthrown the three-century-old Oligarchy, the novel is the annotated manuscript of Avis Everhard. The wife of Socialist leader Ernest Everhard, she is executed with him after the failure of the Second Revolt, which appears to have occurred sometime after 1918. A revolutionary Socialist, London attacked the capitalistic system, making its corporations the founders of the ruthless and repressive Oligarchy. London produces quotations from Calhoun, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt warning against the domination of corporations. He describes the police and strike-breaking functions of the Pinkertons in their service, specifically names eleven industrial groups said to dominate the United States in 1907, and chronicles the efforts of the labor movements for better working conditions. Sometimes maudlin and at other times vituperative, London nevertheless gives a frightening vision of a totalitarian state such as that which later became the actuality described in Silone’s novels of Italy under Mussolini. London anticipates other novels of this type even in particulars, as in the case of his “people of the abyss,” who are purposely degraded and brutalized quite as much as Orwell’s Proles. =James L. Ford, Samuel H. Adams, and Upton Sinclair: Oil Men and Anarchists=