He pioneered in the literature of social protest and apocalypse as well as in the fiction of escape and adventure. He excelled in the "plain style": the terse, imagistic prose so well suited to the depiction of physical violence and to the stringent demands of the modern short story. The publication of "An Odyssey of the North" in the January 1900
Atlantic Monthly and of his first book,
The Son of the Wolf, a few months later was like a draft of bracing Arctic air: "Except for the similar sensation caused by the appearance of Mark Twain's mining-camp humor in the midst of Victorian America, nothing more disturbing to the forces of gentility had ever happened to our literature," says Kenneth Lynn, "and it decisively changed the course of American fiction." London was a major force in establishing for fiction a respectable middle ground between the saloon and the salon, and he blazed the way for such later writers as Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and James Dickey, as well as for George Orwell and Henry Miller.
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