Jack London wrote The Scarlet Plague late in his career, just four years before his early death at the age of 40. London made his debut on the literary scene with novels about nature and the wilderness, often depicting the struggles of both humanity and animals in a hostile environment. The Call of the Wild (1902) brought London fame at the age of 27 with its tale of an intrepid sled dog in the Yukon. London’s subsequent fiction continued in this vein, including The Sea-Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906), and many short stories—works that drew on the author’s experiences as a sailor and a gold prospector in the Klondike. 

Other works by London deal with science and technology through a speculative lens. This is true of early stories like “A Thousand Deaths,” in which a scientist tries to resurrect a dead body. These themes are expanded in the novel Before Adam (1907), the story of a man who dreams that he is an early hominid. As a result of such works, London is credited with helping develop science fiction in its modern form and is often placed in the “Radium Age” of sci-fi literature (1904-1933).