"The Scarlet Plague" by Jack London is a post-apocalyptic novel published in 1912. Set in 2073, sixty years after a devastating epidemic has nearly wiped out humanity, an elderly survivor travels with his primitive grandsons through the ruins of San Francisco. He recounts memories of civilization before the Red Death struck—a world of technology, knowledge, and social order—but struggles to make his grandsons understand a past that seems impossibly distant and unbelievable to them.