Epidemics in Historical Literature
Resources for Research, Practice, and Teaching
Resource List
Curated by Arden Hegele, PhD
Tony Kushner | Angels in America | 1991
Gabriel Garcia Marquez | Love in the Time of Cholera | 1985
Daphne du Maurier | The Birds | 1952
Albert Camus | The Plague | 1947
See also: James Belarde | Fighting a Pandemic: Camus’s “The Plague” and the Physician’s Struggle to Treat in the COVID-19 Outbreak | 2020
Thomas Mann | Death in Venice | 1912
Edgar Allan Poe | The Masque of the Red Death | 1842
Mary Shelley | The Last Man | 1826
Daniel Defoe | Journal of the Plague Year | 1722
Samuel Pepys’ Diary | 1665
William Shakespeare | excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth (with Stephen Greenblatt, What Shakespeare Actually Wrote About the Plague, The New Yorker, May 7, 2020)
Michel de Montaigne | “On Experience,” in Essais | 1588
Giovanni Boccaccio | The Decameron, especially Introduction to Day 1 | 1353
Thucydides | History of the Peloponnesian War, especially firsthand account of the Plague at Athens | 430-427 BCE
Sophocles | Oedipus Rex
Homer | The Iliad, especially first lines of Book I