Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

No war or disaster has killed as many Americans, and yet the pandemic’s imprint on our national psyche is so faint as to be nearly imperceptible. College and high school history textbooks give it short shrift, at best tacking on a sentence or two about it at the end of their chapters on World War I, and relatively few works of literature have focused on it either. This is especially remarkable considering how many extraordinary writers—William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams (the doctor/poet who treated flu victims), F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few—lived through it. Katherine Anne Porter’s own bout with the virus inspired her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Porter came so close to dying that the local newspaper had already typeset her obituary); Thomas Wolfe fictionalized his brother’s death from influenza in Look Homeward, Angel; and William Maxwell described surviving the flu as an eight-year-old boy in They Came Like Swallows. But these authors, along with Mary McCarthy, are the notable exceptions, and they all touched on it only briefly.