The Scarlet Plague - Softcover

London, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444454625 ISBN 13: 9781444454628

Publisher: ValdeBooks, 2023

Synopsis

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the swing of the narrative. "It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches —" Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends. "We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of miles. And the word came of a strange disease that had broken out in New York. There were seventeen millions of people living then in that noblest city of America. Nobody thought anything about the news. It was only a small thing. There had been only a few deaths. It seemed, though, that they had died very quickly, and that one of the first signs of the disease was the turning red of the face and all the body. Within twenty-four hours came the report of the first case in Chicago. And on the same day, it was made public that London, the greatest city in the world, next to Chicago, had been secretly fighting the plague for two weeks and censoring the news despatches — that is, not permitting the word to go forth to the rest of the world that London had the plague. "It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just asthey had overcome other germs in the past. But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic cholera, when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and the next morning, if you got up early enough, you would see him being hauled by your windo...

About this title

About the Author:

John Griffith “Jack” London, birth name John Griffith Chaney, was a prolific American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist, and social activist. He is considered as the pioneer of commercial magazine fiction. He was one of the first fiction writers to obtain world-wide fame and a large fortune from his fiction alone. “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”, set in the Klondike Gold Rush, are considered to be his most popular and well-known works. His short stories, “To Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life”, are also among his famous works. He also wrote about the South Pacific In such stories as “The Pearls of Parley” and “The Heathen”, and about the San Francisco Bay area in “The Sea Wolf”. Jack was a passionate advocate of Socialism, Unionization, and the Rights of Workers. He was also part of the radical literary group, “The Crowd”, in San Francisco. He produced several powerful works on the topics of Socialism, Unionization, and the Rights of Workers, such as his dystopian novel “The Iron Heel”, his non-fiction expose “The People of the Abyss” and “The War of the Classes”.

Review:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: ValdeBooks
• Publication date: 2023
• ISBN 10: 1444454625
• ISBN 13: 9781444454628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 49