John Hay (English) is the author of Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature, a new book published by Cambridge University Press. This scholarly monograph explores the ways that many U.S. authors in the early nineteenth century (such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Thoreau) imagined a future following a global catastrophe. It reveals that life after the end of the world was as popular then as it is now.
