Jack London 
The Scarlet Plague 

Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor of literature recounts the chilling sequence of events which led to his current lowly state – a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days. Modern civilization tottered and fell, and a new race of barbarians – the western world’s brutalized workers – assumed power everywhere. Over the space of a few decades, all learning has been lost. Unlike the professor on Gilligan’s Island, the narrator is the least useful member of a thriving tribe, whose younger generation (who boast names like Hoo-Hoo and Har-Lip) are mostly descended from the tribe’s brutish founder. He was known only by the title of his former occupation, so the tribe’s name is: Chauffeur.

About the author

Jack London (1876-1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush.