The art of survival
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Abstract
An artist can turn bad luck into
good fortune. Texas-born author
Katherine Anne Porter caught
and nearly died from influenza in
the 1918–19 pandemic, but the
experience gave her the material
for Pale Horse, Pale Rider—the title
piece of this selection from Penguin
Modern Classics—and not only the
finest of her very fine short stories,
but also the greatest literary account
of the “Spanish” influenza. Very few
writers besides Porter addressed
the disease, effectively making her
the laureate of a tragedy that no
one much cared to remember until
the parallels with COVID-19 recalled
it to collective consciousness. The
historian Alfred W Crosby found the
absence of writing about the 1918–19
influenza pandemic “puzzling”, given
that the pandemic killed more people
than World War 1. And this is indeed
strange, if you assume that the
greater the death count, the greater
the import. But not all mortality
is alike. Death in the trenches was
public, noble, dramatic; death from
influenza was private, undignified,
prosaic. One caught the imagination
of the 20th century in a way the other
did not.
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