A Canticle for Leibowitz belongs to a class of novels and stories that warn against the various calamities threatening the human race in the twentieth century. Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949) and Brave New World (Huxley, 1932) are often cited, although Miller's novel is much closer to Huxley than Orwell in its humor and satiric wit. A Canticle for Leibowitz also may owe a general kind of debt to a large group of stories depicting nuclear wars and their aftermaths (see Andre Norton's Star Man's Son, 1952, or Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, 1955, as fairly typical examples; Nevil Shute's On The Beach is sometimes cited as an antecedent, but it was published in 1957, after at least two of.....
This is a free excerpt of 118 words. This section contains 234 words. This
study guide contains 29,423 words (approx. 98 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our A Canticle for Leibowitz Access Pass.
