The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

He asked for and was given permission to hire seven people, from relevant federal agencies, to help. His first pick was Richard Hatchett, another doctor who had stopped treating patients and moved into government service. Richard belonged to a dying species: the romantic southern man of letters who travels north and there makes an uneasy home for himself. He’d grown up in Daphne, Alabama, and in 1985 had gone off to Vanderbilt University, where his poetry caught the eye of the eminent poets in residence Donald Davie and Mark Jarman. They’d picked him to represent Vanderbilt at a national collegiate poetry competition, in which he finished second. A judge, the future Pulitzer Prize–winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, singled out one of his poems as the work of a young poet of promise. When asked why, instead of pursuing a career as a poet, he had gone to medical school, Richard would say simply, “Writing is too hard.”