The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.
Illustrated portrait of Mr. Calvin

A character in The Iron Heel

Mr. Calvin

Calvin is a middle-class businessman who believes small capital can restrain the trusts.

The book

Cover of The Iron Heel by Jack London
The Iron HeelJack London, 1908

Industrial wealth consolidates into an oligarchy and crushes the movement trying to oppose it.

View the book

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Calvin is a middle-class businessman who believes small capital can restrain the trusts. Ernest argues that the great combinations will destroy or absorb men like him. Calvin’s class is eventually crushed between organized wealth and organized labor. His personal fate is not detailed.

If you like The Iron Heel

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Jack London

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Margaret Atwood

    Margaret Atwood

    Canadian novelist and poet whose fiction examines power, gender, language, memory, and environmental collapse.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Sinclair Lewis

    Sinclair Lewis

    American novelist who satirised small-town conformity in Main Street and Babbitt, refused the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, and in 1930 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Kurt Vonnegut

    Kurt Vonnegut

    American novelist whose fiction combines satire, science fiction, and the experience of surviving the bombing of Dresden.

    View author
Back to The Iron Heel