Edgar Pangborn 42 min read

For twenty-five years no one has come, and in the seventy-sixth year of his life, Brian Van Anda, perhaps the last man on Earth, lives alone in a great museum, fighting not to remember.

Edgar Pangborn's 1954 story is a lyrical, elegiac post-apocalyptic tale. Poignant, humane, beautifully told. Read it for a haunting story of the last musician playing to an empty world, where the solitude of the final survivor is broken, at last, by an unexpected and fateful arrival.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

42 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Krigstein