sentences:  Jack London was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Masque of the Red Death".Both Poe's story and London's fall into a genre of apocalyptic fiction featuring a universal plague that nearly wipes out humanity.Other examples include Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" (1826), George R. Stewart's "Earth Abides" (1949), Michael Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain" (1969) and Stephen King's "The Stand" (1978).