SOURCE: "Microparasites, Macroparasites, and the Spanish Influenza," in To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 127-55.

In the following excerpt, Leavy discusses works by Wallace Stegner and Katherine Anne Porter in which the influenza epidemic of 1918 figures prominently.

The influenza pandemic of 1918 has been called by one of its historians "the most appalling epidemic since the Middle Ages," but, according to another who has studied it, the "average college graduate born since 1918 literally knows more about the Black Death of the fourteenth century" than about the epidemic. The disease came to be called the Spanish influenza and sometimes, more colorfully and perhaps more insidiously, the Spanish Lady, the feminization of influenza perhaps not as dangerous as the portrayal of syphilis as a woman, but nonetheless contributing to the stereotype of woman as polluter. In any event, there is indeed a glaring...