![]() On its surface, I Am Legend is a simple story of survival. ![]() In 2012, I Am Legend was named the most important vampire novel of the Twentieth Century by the Horror Writers Association.įirst Edition cover of I Am Legend, via Wikimedia Commons () Horror writers Stephen King and Anne Rice list the novel as one of their most important influences. Romero names it as the main inspiration for Night Of The Living Dead. Just this summer, one of its adaptations has inspired COVID deniers with arguments against vaccination. It’s tropes and assumptions are reflected in hundreds of supernatural horror stories, end-of-the-world fables, and survivalist tracts. There have been at least five dramatic works adapted directly from its pages, that have grossed a combined half billion dollars. This re-examination is important now because I Am Legend has remained in print for almost 70 years since it was published in 1954, and has been translated into more than two dozen languages. ![]() Many of the book’s later imitations seem to have been written or filmed in a manner that is stripped of the book’s place, context, and ultimate subversion of the zombie metaphor. Given the ongoing reckoning with global racial dynamics-many of them exacerbated by American cultural hegemony-it is vital that we re-examine these sorts of myths. I would argue that perhaps unwittingly, this novel-and its later imitators-present a narrative that helped America justify to itself patterns of segregation and disenfranchisement, and thus perpetuated them. Disch wrote in his Hugo-winning history of the genre, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of.Īmong the lies that America has chosen to believe about itself over the past 70 years, few have had as lasting-or as pernicious-effects as those wrought by Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. ![]() “America is a nation of liars, for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe,” Thomas M. ![]()
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