The Purple Cloud

The first great "last man" novel, published in 1901, decades before the genre became fashionable. When Adam Jeffson returns from a polar expedition to find a purple cloud has swept across the earth, killing every living thing, he becomes humanity's unlikely survivor. What follows is an extraordinary journey through a silent, dead world - Jeffson wandering the empty cities, scavenging the remnants of civilization, slowly losing his grip on sanity as years of solitude stretch into decades. He builds a palace to his own glory, crowns himself king of the corpse-strewn earth, and descends into increasingly dark psychological territory. H.G. Wells called it brilliant; H.P. Lovecraft praised its "actual majesty." This is proto-science fiction at its most ambitious, blending apocalyptic vision with a haunting meditation on what survival means when there's nothing left to survive for.