SOURCE: "The Music for a Closing: Responses to AIDS in Three American Novels," in AIDS: The Literary Response, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 23-38.

In the following essay, Dewey examines three novels that he considers exemplary literary representations of the realities surrounding AIDS.

The American experience has produced remarkably few journals of plague years. After all, our most direct confrontations with the realities of epidemic infection occurred early in our nation's history, long before a tradition in fiction had begun; encouraged by loosely monitored sanitary conditions, chronic food shortages, impure water supplies, and hordes of insects, "epidemic disorders [regular outbreaks of malaria, smallpox, typhoid, and scarlet fever] visited death and destruction upon the American colonies with relentless regularity." Yet with the exception of Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) with its dark vision of a Philadelphia ravaged by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 the early colonial...