Jack London 1 hr 8 min read

An old man leads his grandsons along a forest-swallowed railway, for sixty years ago the Scarlet Death swept the Earth, and he is one of the last who remember.

Jack London's 1912 novella is a landmark post-apocalyptic tale. Vivid, elegiac, ahead of its time. Read it for one of the great early plague stories, a survivor of a pandemic that ended civilization, telling his half-savage grandchildren of the world that was, in London's stark and haunting vision.

In its time

Published in 1912, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

1 hr 8 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Gordon Grant