Darkness and Dawn

An engineer and a stenographer wake in an office tower a thousand years after the catastrophe: New York is forest, the human race is gone, and something else lives in the ruins. England ran for governor of Maine as a Socialist and wrote some of the earliest American post-apocalyptic fiction — the rebuilding, complete with its politics, is half the book. Fifty-nine plates of ruin and twilight, from Thomas Cole and John Martin to Edvard Munch, echo the fallen cities and wild landscapes of the sleepers' world.