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