Journal of the Plague Year : Being Observations or Memorials of the Mosst Remarkable Occurence

In 1665 the Great Plague swept through London, claiming nearly 100,000 lives. In A Journal, written nearly sixty years later, Defoe vividly chronicled the progress of the epidemic. We follow his fictional narrator through a city transformed: the streets and alleyways deserted; the houses of death with crosses daubed on their doors; the dead-carts on their way to the pits. And he recounts the horrifying stories of the citizens he encounters, as fear, isolation and hysteria take hold. A Journal is both a fascinating historical document and a supreme work of imaginative reconstruction. This edition, based on the original 1722 text, contains a new introduction, an appendix on the plague, a topographical index and maps of contemporary London, and includes Anthony Burgess's original introduction.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), though best remembered for his fiction, including the novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, also wrote on economics, history, biography, and crime and is considered the founder of British journalism. Cynthia Wall is a professor of English literature at the University of Virginia.