Writing During the Apocalypse

All of American literature is a tragedy. What we’re living through now isn’t a tragedy, however – it’s a horror novel. Why bother writing when the world’s on fire?

Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren’t ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.

In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. He also addresses the wider question of what it's like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn’t superfluous. Instead it exists at the core of human experience – as it always has and always will.

Examining creativity as it has manifested in similarly dire circumstances in human history – in a broad range of authors and texts, such as the Bible, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Voltaire, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Stephen King’s The Stand – Writing During the Apocalypse eschews the easy defeatism of nihilism. Instead, it offers a hopeful perspective on the various ways that literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning and generate a spark in the darkness.

With the infamous four horsemen as its guide, Writing During the Apocalypse honors the literary life even during the end of the world.

Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, USA, a staff writer for Literary Hub, and the editor of Belt Magazine. A widely published author, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among dozens of others. Author of over a dozen books, his Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain was included in the “Best Books of 2024” by The New Yorker.

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