The Great Influenza Study Guide

John M. Barry grew up in Rhode Island, graduated from Brown University, and then moved to Washington, D.C., to begin a career as a freelance writer. He published his first book, a political history called The Ambition and The Power: A True Story of Washington, in 1989. For his second book, The Transformed Cell: Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer, he teamed up with co-author Dr. Steven Rosenberg. While Barry’s previous books were well-reviewed, he achieved wider recognition with Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America, which was first published in 1997 and which experienced a resurgence in popularity after Hurricane Katrina. Today, however, he is best known for The Great Influenza, which was first published in 2004 and has been re-published in five new editions, most recently in January 2021 with an afterword that addresses the COVID-19 pandemic.

While Barry’s book focuses in particular on the year 1918 and its aftermath, his book’s scope goes as far back as 600 B.C., when Hippocrates and his followers became perhaps the first humans in recorded history to study medicine. He sketches the entire history of medicine, showing how, though doctors did more harm than good for centuries, their research established the groundwork for key medical breakthroughs in the mid-to-late 19th century. Other plagues and epidemics, particularly the Black Death, which devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, provide a precedent for the 1918 influenza pandemic, and modern scientists studying influenza looked to these past plagues for answers.

Though The Great Influenza is one of the best-known books today on the 1918 influenza epidemic, other books that have chronicled the pandemic include Flu by Gina Kolata, America’s Forgotten Pandemic by Jared W. Crosby, and Pandemic 1918 by Catharine Arnold. As Barry notes in his own book, one of the noteworthy features of the 1918 pandemic is that, for the most part, it doesn’t appear in literature published at the time. Famous early twentieth-century authors like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald either completely ignore the pandemic in their work or only mention it in passing. Examples of later pandemic fiction include Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” written in the 1930s, and William Maxwell’s novel They Came Like Swallows, published in 1937.