At Midnight on the 31st of March by Josephine Young Case (1938)

Back in 1938, before scores of post-apocalyptic novels featuring groups of people trying to survive after various disasters, Josephine Young Case wrote this short novel about a community of 200 who wake up on April 1 to find that the rest of civilization seems to have disappeared. The roads all end at the edge of town. Electricity stops. Nothing but static comes over the short-wave radio. Exploring teams find no traces of anyone else. They are alone.

This is the story of how a group of people who all know each other react and interact when all the modern conveniences are taken away and they are thrown on their own devices. As their way of life changes they also change, some for the better, rising to the challenge, and some for the worse, seeing new opportunities for malevolence. Some even come to see a value in their return to earlier ways. The cycles of life continue--marriage, childbirth, death--and all but a few find that they have developed a will to survive.

What makes this book unique is that the entire story is written in blank verse. (Quick lesson: blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, meaning that each line has ten syllables with five units, or feet, of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable.) This should not be intimidating to readers at all because, as Shakespeare proved, the English language is admirably suited to this rhythm. The poetic structure just makes a touching story sound even more beautiful.