In the following essay, Tritt explores similarities between Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" and Asimov's "Nightfall," finding both have "darkness and mankind's reaction to it" as a central theme.

When Asimov sat down, a sheet of paper in front of him, blank except for Emerson's quotation from Nature as a heading, what a great feat of extrapolation was involved in pounding out "Nightfall" (1941), one of his best short stories. True, Asimov and his editor Campbell had talked of the Emerson quotation, had even decided together upon the name of the story; but in the end, it was up to Asimov to "face the empty sheet of paper in the typewriter." Without detracting from his imaginative accomplishment, I would like to suggest that Asimov may have drawn not so much on the American poet and essayist as on an earlier work of Byron's, the poem "Darkness" (1816). This poem, though...