In 1910, Jack London Saw COVID Coming
In The Scarlet Plague, the California Author Imagined a 21st-Century Epidemic Hitting the Bay Area and the World
Jack London saw this coming. So why didn’t we?
In 1910 the California author, already famous for The Call of the Wild and White Fang, wrote a short post-apocalyptic novel about a 21st-century pandemic in his home state.
To revisit The Scarlet Plague now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, is to marvel at how much London understood—a century ago—about the challenges facing Californians now.
London imagined a global epidemic in the year 2013 that killed almost all the people in California, and presumably on Earth. In the novel, …
