When the plague swept through London in 1665 and killed twenty percent of its population who ended up in hastily dug mass graves, five-year old Daniel Defoe survived because his family left the city. In 1722 the author of Robinson Crusoe and other classic books published this path-breaking account of the human responses to a horrendous pandemic with no visible cause, based on an uncle’s journals. Combining unusual curiosity and actual historical data with deep compassion, Defoe chronicles his fellow-citizen’s disbelief and denial at the first cases, the desperate escapes from a ravaged London, and the alternately charitable and callous but heartrending stories of those who lived through it or died. A Journal of the Plague Year reveals with undiminished urgency how we make sense of our role in a cataclysmic historical event when many of the rules, expectations, and acts of creating meaning have been upended.