The Most Famous 1918 Pandemic Survivors

The Spanish Flu pandemic that began in 1918 was one of the most devastating in human history. In total, between 20 and 50 million people died over the course of two years — and a few very famous faces were caught right in the middle of it.

Most famous for Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novels are on pretty much every high school reading list, and it's no wonder. Like nobody else, Steinbeck was able to capture a bygone America, and the lives of Americans who are too often overlooked by history. But those books came very close to never being written.

Steinbeck was 16 years old in 1918, and by that point he already knew that he wanted to be a writer. But, to steal an obvious phrase, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry — and not only did Steinbeck contract Spanish flu, but he nearly died from it, too. In fact, his case was so bad that his infected lung filled with fluid, and in order for a local doctor to get in and drain it, he needed to have a rib removed. Steinbeck survived, of course, but his missing rib gave him grief for the rest of his life. Always the writer, he would later recall the experience:

"I went down and down, until the wingtips of angels brushed my eyes."

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John Steinbeck | 0:00
Walt Disney | 1:02
Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish | 1:54
Gandhi | 3:03
Leo Szilard | 3:59
Amelia Earhart | 5:06
Edvard Munch | 5:59
T.S. Eliot | 6:50
Woodrow Wilson | 7:33
Franklin D. Roosevelt | 8:39

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