The Scarlet Plague

“London’s style is typically lush but his viewpoint is skeptical and dystopian...the story reminds us of the dangers we still court with our careless ways.”-The Times“Jack London saw this coming.Why didn’t we?...To revisit The Scarlet Plague during the COVID-19 crisis is to marvel at how much London understood- a century ago-about the challenges we face now.”-The Baltimore SunThe Scarlet Plague (1915) is an early dystopian novel written by Jack London in 1910, serialized in London Magazine in 1912, and finally published as a book in 1915. Set in 2073, sixty years after a pandemic has wiped out most of earth’s population, an old man recounts the events to his grandsons. The old man had been a professor of English Literature at the University of California Berkeley, and managed to survive the pandemic by isolating himself in the chemistry facility at the school.Later, he spent years living alone in an empty hotel in Yosemite, until he finally joined a group of rag-tag survivors in San Fr