A Canticle For Leibowitz (S.F. MASTERWORKS) [Hardcover]

Angry, eloquent...a terrific story. (New York TIMES )

Prodigiously imaginative, richly comic, terrifyingly grim. (CHICAGO Tribune ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The brilliant and provocative classic of the post-nuclear age, ranking with 1984 and Brave New World in its visionary power

First there was the Fallout, the plagues and the madness. Then the bloodletting of the Simplification began, when the people - those few who were left - turned against the rulers, the teachers and the scientists who had turned the world into a barren desert, where great clouds of wrath had destroyed the forests and the fields. All knowledge was destroyed, all the learned killed - and only Leibowitz managed to save some of his books. And the monks of the Order of Leibowitz kept the sacred relics, copying, illuminating and interpreting the holy fragments, slowly fashioning a new Renaissance in a barbarous and fallen world.

Walter M. Miller Jr (1923- 1996) grew up in the American south. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of the war as a radio operator and gunner, participating in fifty-five combat sorties over Italy and the Balkans, including the assault on Monte Cassino. After the war he studied engineering before turning to writing. A Canticle for Leibowitz won a Hugo, and his only other novel, Leibowitz and the Wild Horsewoman was published posthumously.