The Scarlet Plague

Jack London's ‘The Scarlet Plague,’ which originally appeared in The London Magazine in 1912, ranks among the earliest works of post-apocalyptic fiction. This pioneering science-fiction novella, like many of the master storyteller's other tales, explores the thin line between civilization and barbarism. Recounted with humor, suspense, and pathos, London's harrowing vision of the future raises compelling questions about social class, knowledge, and human nature.
Once the red rash appears, it is too late. The victims die within hours, their rapidly decomposing bodies spreading the disease in the dust. Art, science, and learning die with them while the few survivors degenerate into feral clans. This story takes place in 2073, sixty years after the great pandemic of 2013. A former professor of literature—now a dirty old man in goatskin—tells his incredulous and uncomprehending grandsons, ‘I am the last man who was alive in the days of the plague and who knows the wonders of that far-off time. We, who mastered the planet—its earth, and sea, and sky—and who were as very gods, now live in primitive savagery.’

John Griffith London was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay", and "The Heathen".
London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, workers' rights, and socialism. He wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.
London died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. London's ashes were buried on his property not far from the Wolf House. The grave is marked by a mossy boulder. The buildings and property were later preserved as Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California.