11 Authors Who Survived Wars, Plagues, and Pandemics

Ernest Hemingway – The American Who Carried Death on His Back

Ernest Hemingway was just 18 years old when he was struck by an Austrian mortar shell on July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross on the Italian front in World War I. The explosion occurred while he was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in a dugout, knocking him unconscious and burying him in earth, with shell fragments piercing his right foot, knee, thighs, scalp, and hand. Despite his severe injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was wounded again by machine-gun fire, earning him the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government—one of the first Americans to receive such an honor. He received more than 200 artillery fragment wounds in his legs during that night attack. This traumatic experience shattered his youthful illusion of immortality, as he later reflected: “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you… Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.” The brutal reality of war would forever shape his sparse, unsentimental writing style and provide material for masterpieces like “A Farewell to Arms.”

Gabriel García Márquez – Love and Death in Times of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, in the Caribbean coastal region known for its vibrancy and rhythm, contrasting sharply with the dreary, mountainous interior where the capital Bogotá was located. His grandfather, Gabriel Eligio García, was greatly respected in the coastal region for his refusal to remain silent about political atrocities during Colombia’s seemingly endless civil war, particularly the massacre of perhaps 3,000 banana workers by thugs employed by the United Fruit Company that occurred the year after Gabriel’s birth. García Márquez’s role as a journalist in Colombia presented a precarious way to make a living because of the instability of many newspapers and magazines, requiring him to navigate through the dizzying array of loyalties and betrayals in the seemingly never-ending “La Violencia” which gripped Colombia for much of the 20th century, eventually morphing into the narco-terrorism of Escobar, Ochoa, and Lederer. His novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” while on a much smaller scale than “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” deals with the Colombian civil wars of this period and the violence left in its wake. The novel references Colombia’s history of cholera epidemics, civil wars, and social stratification. These experiences of living through violence and disease in Colombia inspired the magical realism that would make him a Nobel Prize winner in 1982.

Virginia Woolf – Surviving War and the Forgotten Pandemic

Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived through the Spanish flu pandemic, which raged worldwide from 1918-1919 while the couple were living in Richmond, and which was estimated to have killed 100 million people around the globe and more than 250,000 in Britain alone. In July 1918 diary entries, Virginia noted that their London neighbor had influenza and later reported that she had succumbed to the disease, while Virginia herself contracted influenza at the end of 1919, confining her to bed in what is thought to be part of the pandemic strain. Her physician, Dr. Fergusson, worried that many bouts of influenza—in 1916, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1923, and 1925—had done lasting damage to her nervous system and heart. She documented the Spanish flu experience in her diary in 1918, noting mockingly how “we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since The Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe and thus precipitate us into peace,” suggesting that illness promised to bring an end to the profit of war. The protagonist of “Mrs Dalloway” is a survivor of the Spanish flu of 1919, with Woolf giving her protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, a similar backstory to her own experience, describing how the London society woman “grown white since her illness” and whose doctors told her that the influenza had damaged her heart. Her experiences with both World War I and the pandemic profoundly influenced her reflections on time, loss, and consciousness in her literary works.

Albert Camus – Confronting Disease and Totalitarianism

Albert Camus survived tuberculosis in his youth and lived through Nazi-occupied France during World War II. His personal battle with tuberculosis began when he was just 17 years old, forcing him to abandon his dreams of becoming a professional footballer and profoundly shaping his understanding of human mortality and suffering. The disease would recur throughout his life, serving as a constant reminder of the fragility of human existence. During the German occupation of France, Camus worked as a journalist and became involved with the French Resistance, witnessing firsthand the brutal realities of totalitarian control. These twin experiences of battling a deadly disease and living under oppression provided the foundation for his existential masterpiece “The Plague,” published in 1947. The novel, set in the Algerian city of Oran during a plague outbreak, functions as both a literal account of a disease epidemic and a powerful allegory for the Nazi occupation of France, exploring themes of isolation, solidarity, and the human response to inexplicable suffering. His existential philosophy, born from these lived experiences of confronting death and tyranny, established him as one of the most important voices of 20th-century literature.

Louisa May Alcott – From Civil War Nurse to Literary Legend

Louisa May Alcott served as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown during the American Civil War, where she contracted typhoid pneumonia after just six weeks of service in late 1862. Her dedication to caring for wounded soldiers exposed her to the brutal realities of war and the deadly diseases that often claimed more lives than battlefield injuries. The typhoid fever nearly killed her, leaving her with permanent health problems including mercury poisoning from the treatments of the era. Her harrowing experiences treating wounded and dying soldiers, many barely older than boys, profoundly affected her worldview and writing. She documented these experiences in her memoir “Hospital Sketches,” published in 1863, which provided readers with an unflinching look at the conditions faced by Civil War nurses and patients. The realism and emotional depth she gained from witnessing human suffering during the war later informed her famous novel “Little Women,” giving depth and authenticity to her portrayal of family struggles during wartime. Her service during one of America’s bloodiest conflicts transformed her from a struggling writer into one who understood the true cost of war, both on the battlefield and in the hearts of those who served.

Kurt Vonnegut – Witnessing Dresden’s Inferno as a Prisoner of War

Kurt Vonnegut was captured as a prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and witnessed one of World War II’s most controversial Allied bombing campaigns. As a POW held in Dresden, he experienced the massive firebombing of the city on February 13-14, 1945, which killed an estimated 25,000 civilians and destroyed the historic city center. Vonnegut and other American prisoners were housed in an underground slaughterhouse, Schlachthof-fünf (Slaughterhouse-Five), which became the title of his most famous novel. The morning after the bombing, he was ordered to help clear bodies from the ruins, a traumatic experience that would haunt him for decades. The absurdity and horror of witnessing such massive civilian casualties in what was essentially a terror bombing profoundly shaped his anti-war philosophy and darkly comic writing style. He struggled for years to process and write about this experience, finally publishing “Slaughterhouse-Five” in 1969, more than two decades after the war ended. The novel blends science fiction elements with brutal realism, using the fictional character Billy Pilgrim’s time-traveling experiences to explore the psychological impact of surviving such senseless destruction. Vonnegut’s firsthand experience of war’s ultimate absurdity created one of literature’s most powerful anti-war statements.

Mary Shelley – Gothic Imagination Born from Tragedy and Terror

Mary Shelley lived through the tumultuous aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and witnessed the social upheaval and scientific fears of the early 19th century. Born in 1797, she grew up during a period marked by constant warfare, political revolution, and rapid scientific advancement that challenged traditional beliefs about life and death. Her life was overshadowed by personal tragedy from an early age, with her mother, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, dying shortly after her birth, and later losing several of her own children in infancy. The famous summer of 1816, known as the “Year Without a Summer” due to volcanic ash blocking sunlight worldwide, created an atmosphere of apocalyptic dread that directly influenced her creation of “Frankenstein.” During this dark summer at Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, she spent time with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley discussing galvanism, scientific experiments, and the possibilities of reanimating dead tissue. The widespread fears about cholera epidemics sweeping across Europe, combined with grave robbing scandals and early electrical experiments on corpses, fed into the Gothic horror of her famous novel. Her masterpiece “Frankenstein,” written when she was just 18, reflected the era’s anxieties about scientific overreach, the boundaries between life and death, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The novel became a powerful meditation on the consequences of playing God during an age when both war and disease regularly demonstrated human mortality’s fragility.

Chinua Achebe – Voice from the Heart of African Conflict

Chinua Achebe lived through Nigeria’s brutal Biafran War (1967-1970), one of Africa’s most devastating civil conflicts that resulted in widespread starvation and genocide. As an Igbo intellectual, Achebe experienced firsthand the ethnic tensions that led to the systematic massacre of Igbo people in northern Nigeria, forcing him and millions of others to flee to the southeastern region that declared independence as Biafra. During the 30-month war, he served as a roving ambassador for Biafra, traveling internationally to raise awareness about the humanitarian crisis and the blockade that caused mass starvation. The conflict, which killed an estimated one to three million people, mostly from hunger and disease, profoundly shaped his understanding of post-colonial African politics and the legacy of European colonialism. Achebe witnessed children dying of kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that became the haunting symbol of the Biafran tragedy, and saw how international powers prioritized economic interests over human lives. His experience of the war’s aftermath, including the challenges of reintegration and reconciliation, informed his later works that explored the complexities of African identity in the post-colonial era. His memoir “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra” chronicles not only the violence and starvation but also the hope and resilience of a people fighting for survival and dignity. The war transformed Achebe from a novelist focused on pre-colonial African life into a chronicler of contemporary African struggles against both internal conflicts and external exploitation.

Katherine Anne Porter – Dancing with Death During the Spanish Flu

Katherine Anne Porter was a young, aspiring writer when she contracted influenza during the 1918 pandemic in Denver, Colorado, with her case so severe she was essentially given up for dead before making a surprising, albeit slow recovery. Her death seemed imminent; the newspaper had her obituary set in type, her fever was so severe that her hair turned white and fell out, and the first time she tried to sit up after her illness she fell and broke her arm, developing phlebitis in one leg and being told she would never walk again. Born 130 years ago in Indian Creek, Texas, Porter should have died alongside 675,000 of her countrymen in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, but instead defied the Reaper and lived another 62 years, becoming one of the most acclaimed American writers of the 20th century. The army lieutenant she was involved with at the time died from the flu, and events surrounding this illness form the backdrop for her masterpiece “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Nearly two decades after surviving the 1918 influenza pandemic, Porter drew upon her experience for the novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” first published in 1938, which is set against the backdrop of the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic and narrates the dual story of individual and societal trauma and survival amidst the pandemic. The 1918–’19 influenza pandemic, which infected a third of the world’s population and killed at least 50 million, directly inspired almost no major works of literature, with Porter’s triad of elegant novellas being the most significant. Her near-death experience became one of literature’s most vivid depictions of pandemic survival.

George Orwell – From Spanish Bullets to London’s Blitz

George Orwell’s political awakening came through direct combat experience in the Spanish Civil War, where he served with the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) militia from 1936 to 1937. While fighting on the Aragon front, he was shot through the throat by a Fascist sniper’s bullet, an injury that nearly killed him and left him with a permanently damaged voice. The wound was so severe that the bullet missed his carotid artery by mere millimeters, and he initially thought he was dying as he felt the strength drain from his body. His recovery took months, during which he witnessed the brutal political purges within the Republican forces, as Stalin’s agents systematically eliminated Trotskyist and anarchist fighters. This betrayal of revolutionary ideals by his own side profoundly disillusioned him and shaped his lifelong opposition to totalitarianism in all its forms. Returning to England, he lived through the London Blitz during World War II, experiencing nightly bombing raids that killed thousands of civilians and destroyed vast areas of the city. His experiences of both fascist bullets and Nazi bombs informed his understanding of how totalitarian regimes use violence and fear to control populations. These lived experiences of war, betrayal, and survival under bombing became the foundation for his dystopian masterpieces “Animal Farm” and “1984,” which remain among the most powerful warnings about the dangers of authoritarianism ever written.

The Literature of Survival

These ten authors transformed their encounters with death, disease, and destruction into some of the most powerful literature ever written. Their survival allowed them to bear witness to humanity’s darkest moments while also revealing the resilience of the human spirit. From Hemingway’s sparse prose born from battlefield trauma to Porter’s haunting depiction of pandemic delirium, each writer’s brush with mortality became the crucible that forged their unique literary voice. Their works serve as testament to the idea that great art often emerges from great suffering, and that those who survive catastrophe carry a responsibility to tell the stories of those who didn’t. In our current age of global challenges, their experiences remind us that literature’s greatest power lies not in escapism, but in helping us understand and endure the most difficult aspects of human existence. Did you expect that survival could create such beautiful, terrible art?