The Shadow Library: The Late Great Planet Earth

Being members of one doom-cult for a while and then being out of it, it did not seem completely unlikely to us that Hal Lindsay may have had some version of the same beliefs, either more or less heretical to ours, or, then, our old cult was the heresy and Lindsay’s ideas the more orthodox. That they were both more or less just chin-music had yet to be proven and seemed to merit some investigation. And popular? For a while you couldn’t go to a garage sale without finding a cheap copy for sale. The idea of the end of the world was both titillating and invigorating; if you could believe that the good guys would win, it was all the more re-assuring in an uncertain world. We had our battered second-hand copy, right in the same communal bookhoard as Chariots of the Gods? and somehow in the same genre. Lindsay kept tap-dancing after the proposed expiration date, but his heyday was over long before he himself passed away, still waiting for the earthly millenium. Somehow, the book continues to be reprinted and sold.

“The Late Great Planet Earth is a 1970 book by Hal Lindsey, with contributions by Carole C. Carlson, first published by Zondervan. The New York Times declared it to be the bestselling [speculative] nonfiction book of the 1970s. Over 28 million copies have been sold and the book has been translated into 54 languages.

It was adapted by Rolf Forsberg and Robert Amram into a 1978 film narrated by Orson Welles and released by Pacific International Enterprises. Religion historian Crawford Gribben states that The Late Great Planet Earth "set a pattern for the shape of the political re-engagement of American evangelicals in the final third of the twentieth century" …

The Late Great Planet Earth is a treatment of dispensational premillennialism. As such, it compared end-time prophecies in the Bible with then-current events in an attempt to predict future scenarios resulting in the rapture of believers before the Great Tribulation and Second Coming of Jesus to establish his thousand-year (i.e. millennial) kingdom on Earth. Lindsey originally suggested the possibility that these climactic events might occur during the 1980s, which he interpreted as one generation from the foundation of modern Israel during 1948. Some readers accepted this as an indication that the Tribulation or the Rapture would occur no later than 1988. The Late Great Planet Earth was the first Christian prophecy book to be published by a secular publisher (Bantam, 1973) and sell many copies. 28 million copies had sold by 1990." - Wikipedia