On opposite coasts of the United States, Jack London and Stephen Crane fashioned the direct yet nuanced voice of the twentieth century. Contemporaries born in the late nineteenth century, both worked in the same direction, their prose breaking with the Victorian genteel tradition and using the vocabulary and rhythms of living speech, anticipating Hemingway and many other important writers to follow. Both London and Crane, moreover, called for urgent social reform as slums grew worse in the country’s major urban areas.
Despite the warm early reception of London’s work, it is Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1885), which described the experience of a federal soldier in a battle resembling Chancellorsville, that has become a fixture in the canon of American literature. Its direct, descriptive style, however, has much in common with London’s prose. The Red Badge of Courage begins:
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet.
The disciplined prose of Jack London’s passage from The Sea-Wolf (1904) makes for an excellent comparison:
Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft,
