Great Literature inspired by Pandemics

The first great work is probably Boccaccio's "Decameron". He created 100 stories narrated by a group of 10 young men & women, over a period of 10 days, who withdraw to the countryside when the Great Plague was ravaging Europe.

Two famous authors wrote about the Plague in London. Samuel Pepys, the great diarist, was an eye-witness & gave an account in his diary. But a more gripping, absorbing account was written by a man, who was a child & was probably removed out of London for safety when the Plague was raging. He was Daniel Defoe & the book "The Journal of the Plague year." With meticulous research among the documents extant, he created a day to day account, that is unique among the books of this genre, & gives London the city a stellar role in the narrative.

A later outbreak in France provided the material for Albert Camus's "The Plague." It is also an existential classic, which symbolically depicts the epidemic-like war clouds hovering over Europe at that time. An outsider, inadvertently trapped in a plague infested town, trying to get away is the protagonist.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the time of Cholera" also deals with the events during an epidemic.

Though strictly speaking, tuberculosis cannot be classed as an epidemic, it is contagious & Thomas Mann in his "The Magic Mountain", creates an insular world in a Swiss town. Hans Castorp, visiting a sick cousin there, contracts the consumption himself & stays there for seven years, meeting an unforgettable gallery of characters. Mann, like Camus, uses illness as a metaphor for the anti-Semitic carnage which followed.