From Library of America Comes "A Reading List for 'the most deadly pandemic in human history'"

I realize that not everyone wants to be reading about pandemics from the past right now - and for good reason. Instead, some of us (perhaps, most of us) are looking for ways to escape the subject, BUT if you are one that wonders how the world managed to get through this kind of thing last century, Library of America (my absolute favorite publisher of all time) has prepared a reading list just for you:

A reading list for "the most deadly pandemic in human history"

What makes this all so particularly intriguing is LOA's emphasis on how the Spanish flue pandemic of 1918-1919 with its 675,000 American victims "became a formative experience for a generation of American writers."

Here's just a taste of the LOA blog article:

Mary McCarthy was orphaned after both her parents succumbed, which led to the unhappy childhood she recounted in Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood. Thomas Wolfe never got over the loss of his brother Ben; barely fictionalized, Ben’s death is a key episode in Wolfe’s debut, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). A section of Wallace Stegner’s autobiographical 1943 novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain depicts the flu’s ravages among homesteaders in the American Northwest and across the border in Canada. William Carlos Williams, working as a family doctor in New Jersey, reported making up to sixty calls a day; he later wrote, “we hadn’t a thing that was effective in checking that potent poison that was sweeping the world.”

For a compelling list of works and authors associated with the Spanish Flu outbreak, please click on the link up above.