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What happened to the city of Allendale in "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury?

Allendale is the fictional name given to the city where the automated house—the main character of Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains"—is located. The house reveals the name of the city in its morning announcements, which seem to fall on deaf ears because no human characters are present. Despite the absence of humans, the house carries out its duties, including making breakfast and then launching into a daily cleaning routine. Eventually, the reader discovers the human characters have been killed in an atomic bomb blast which, miraculously, has spared this one dwelling:



The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.



Allendale has been the victim of a nuclear attack. Bradbury first published the story in 1950, five years after the end of World War II and the bomb blasts which destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but his story is definitely a vision of the future where human beings have been rendered virtually obsolete in the running of their own house. The story mirrors the post-apocalyptic theme of Sara Teasdale's poem of the same name that was published in the years after World War I.

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