I Am Legend
Paperback original, 1954
I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson is one of the most consequential works of post-apocalyptic fiction ever published, and one of the rare novels that genuinely transformed multiple genres simultaneously. Set in a near-future Los Angeles devastated by a pandemic bacterium, the novel follows Robert Neville, apparently the last uninfected human alive, as he fortifies his home each night against the vampiric infected who surround it. During the days he hunts them. The novel is relentless in its psychological realism, demonstrating what prolonged, absolute isolation does to a man's mind and sense of self.
This Gold Medal Books paperback is the true first edition of the novel. Matheson was twenty-six when he wrote it, and it was published not in hardcover but as a paperback original. The cover art is a painting by Stan Meltzoff.
Paperback. First Edition, Paperback Original. Gold Medal Original, 417 ($0.25). Cover art by Stan Meltzoff. New York: Gold Medal / Fawcett Publications, 1954. #11451.
Fine. Exceptional copy with only trivial wear.
This Gold Medal Books paperback is the true first edition of the novel. Matheson was twenty-six when he wrote it, and it was published not in hardcover but as a paperback original. The cover art is a painting by Stan Meltzoff.
Paperback. First Edition, Paperback Original. Gold Medal Original, 417 ($0.25). Cover art by Stan Meltzoff. New York: Gold Medal / Fawcett Publications, 1954. #11451.
Fine. Exceptional copy with only trivial wear.
Additional Details
Richard Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954 as a Gold Medal paperback original. It received mixed reviews on publication, but it would go on to become a considerable success, and its importance to the genre would only increase over time.
The premise is deceptively simple. A pandemic caused by an airborne bacterium has converted the human population into vampires. Robert Neville, immune for reasons he spends much of the novel trying to understand, lives alone in a boarded-up house in Compton, California. The infected come for him every night. He spends his days staking the dormant ones, scavenging supplies, and conducting amateur scientific research into the nature of the infection. He is, by any reasonable measure, slowly losing his mind from sustained solitude.
Peel away its tough guy, hard-boiled shell, and there's a novel of deep sentiment and existential force underneath. Particularly memorable is when Neville desperately courts a stray dog for weeks, the first chance at any real companionship presented in more than a year. That question of why even bother living is never more pronounced than at the end of the dog episode. When Neville is finally captured by a community of infected who have, under the influence of an experimental drug, stabilized their condition and begun to reconstruct a functional society. From their perspective, Neville is a predator who has spent years stalking and killing them while they slept, anything but heroic. He is a monster, and they fear him the way people have always feared what they cannot explain and do not understand. The novel ends with Neville recognizing this and accepting it. Neville will become legend to the new civilization the way vampires were legend to the old one.
The novel's influence on subsequent genre fiction is difficult to overstate. Matheson himself wrote the screenplay for the first film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, and went on to write numerous scripts for The Twilight Zone, becoming one of the defining voices in American speculative fiction of the postwar era. Two more film adaptations would follow: The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith. None of the adaptations retained the novel's ending in its true form. George Romero acknowledged the novel directly as the primary inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (1968), which established the template for the modern zombie film. Stephen King has written extensively about Matheson's influence on his own work, and The Stand in particular owes a structural debt to I Am Legend's vision of pandemic collapse and its aftermath.
The premise is deceptively simple. A pandemic caused by an airborne bacterium has converted the human population into vampires. Robert Neville, immune for reasons he spends much of the novel trying to understand, lives alone in a boarded-up house in Compton, California. The infected come for him every night. He spends his days staking the dormant ones, scavenging supplies, and conducting amateur scientific research into the nature of the infection. He is, by any reasonable measure, slowly losing his mind from sustained solitude.
Peel away its tough guy, hard-boiled shell, and there's a novel of deep sentiment and existential force underneath. Particularly memorable is when Neville desperately courts a stray dog for weeks, the first chance at any real companionship presented in more than a year. That question of why even bother living is never more pronounced than at the end of the dog episode. When Neville is finally captured by a community of infected who have, under the influence of an experimental drug, stabilized their condition and begun to reconstruct a functional society. From their perspective, Neville is a predator who has spent years stalking and killing them while they slept, anything but heroic. He is a monster, and they fear him the way people have always feared what they cannot explain and do not understand. The novel ends with Neville recognizing this and accepting it. Neville will become legend to the new civilization the way vampires were legend to the old one.
The novel's influence on subsequent genre fiction is difficult to overstate. Matheson himself wrote the screenplay for the first film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, and went on to write numerous scripts for The Twilight Zone, becoming one of the defining voices in American speculative fiction of the postwar era. Two more film adaptations would follow: The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith. None of the adaptations retained the novel's ending in its true form. George Romero acknowledged the novel directly as the primary inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (1968), which established the template for the modern zombie film. Stephen King has written extensively about Matheson's influence on his own work, and The Stand in particular owes a structural debt to I Am Legend's vision of pandemic collapse and its aftermath.
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