Seven Who Survived

A collective biography of seven notable survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic who exemplify resilience

Between 50 million and 100 million people succumbed to the “Spanish flu” of 1918 and 1919, one of the deadliest disasters of the twentieth century. In Seven Who Survived, Nico Slate presents a collective biography of seven survivors that offers an intimate window into one of the deadliest pandemics in the history of humanity. An American writer, a British statesman, an Indian freedom fighter, a Norwegian painter, an American artist, a Bohemian writer, and a Canadian actress were taken seriously ill during the pandemic, yet all lived to make a profound mark on the world. In telling their stories, Slate explores such questions as: What did it mean to live through a pandemic? What was the physical, emotional, and psychological toll? What scars did they carry into the future?

Slate identifies resilience as the quality that united Katherine Anne Porter, David Lloyd George, Mahatma Gandhi, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Franz Kafka, and Mary Pickford. But it was not the resilience of returning to who they were before the pandemic. Indeed, in the words of Kafka, “Beyond a certain point there is no return.” Slate demonstrates the ways in which all seven survivors coped with the prospect of dying by finding new purpose in living. Chronicling not only their struggles to balance the physical demands of survival with their desire to discover a newfound reason for living, Seven Who Survived also relates how they faced an even greater challenge—one that some failed to recognize while others found it endlessly haunting: how to make sense of their continued existence when so many others had died.