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I Am Legend is a 1954 science fiction novel by Richard Matheson about the last man alive in a future Los Angeles, California. It is notable as influential on the developing modern vampire genre as well as the zombie genre, in popularizing the fictional concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to disease, and in exploring the notion of vampirism as a disease. The novel was a success and was adapted to film as The Last Man on Earth in 1964, as The Omega Man in 1971, and again in 2007 as I Am Legend.

Plot Summary:

I Am Legend covers the daily life of Robert Neville from January of 1976 to January of 1979, in Los Angeles. The story opens with the monotony and horror of quotidian life for the protagonist, who apparently is the sole survivor of a bacterial pandemic apocalypse, the symptoms of which are like vampirism. Neville prepares for the nightly sieges from a vampire horde. He spends the daytime hours repairing his house: boarding windows, hanging garlic garlands, disposing of vampire corpses, and gathering supplies.

The story is Neville's attempt to comprehend, and possibly cure, the disease that killed mankind, showing his research of vampirism, and its possible causes. Via flashback, Neville's past is revealed. Moreover, his emotional struggle to cope with losing his family is dealt with by going about a daily routine.

Neville sees the destruction of the infected survivors as a right, a moral imperative, even, to be pursued for his own — and mankind's — survival, yet, in the end, he glimpses a future society wherein infection is normal and he, Neville, is a murderous, biologic deviant. He then grasps that, just as vampires were legend in pre-infection times, now he, Robert Neville, is legend for the new human race born of the infection.