It was to Porter that the American historian Alfred Crosby dedicated his landmark 1989 study of Spanish flu, an illness that is thought to have killed close to 100 million people, far outnumbering the dead of the two world wars. In 1939, she wrote Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the story of a man who dies of the flu after nursing his stricken girlfriend. She recovered, but when her ebony hair grew back, it had turned pure white. In October 1918, in Denver, Colorado, the young American novelist Katherine Anne Porter caught the same disease. Emerging from between his wife’s legs, and confronting the viewer, can be seen the sorrowful face of the Schieles’s unborn child. The Family shows a gaunt and naked Schiele hunched, one long arm pressed across his heart. Schiele died of the same cause three days later, halfway through painting his most haunting work. That month, his wife, Edith, six months pregnant with the couple’s child, died of a terrible disease. I n October 1918, the Austrian artist Egon Schiele was 28.
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