“It has been 60 years since the great Red Death wiped out mankind, and the handful of survivors from all walks of life have established their own civilization and their own hierarchy in a savage world.” The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel written by Jack London. It was written in 1910 but not serialized until the May–June 1912 issue of London Magazine. The author was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Masque of the Red Death". London published The Scarlet Plague in book form at a point in his career that biographers and critics have called a "professional decline", from September 1912 to May 1916. In this period, he stopped writing short works and shifted to longer works including The Abysmal Brute, John Barleycorn, The Mutiny of the Elsinore, The Star Rover and others. The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Smith is one of the survivors of the era before the scarlet plague hit and is still left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip. His grandsons are young and live as primaeval hunter-gatherers in a heavily depopulated world. Their intellect is limited, as are their language abilities. Edwin asks Smith, whom they call "Granser", to tell them of the disease alternately referred to as scarlet plague, scarlet death, or red death. Listen online to free English audiobook "The Scarlet Plague” on our website to experience Jack London's short story.
