When aids first penetrated american consciousness back in 1981, few cultural critics were prepared to predict that this epidemic would have a broad and deep impact on the arts. But ten years later, it is possible to argue that virtually every form of art or entertainment in America has been touched by AIDS. Every month, it seems, more is added to the oeuvre of art, dance, music, and fiction inspired by the current crisis. Not even tuberculosis, that most “aesthetic” of epidemics, produced a comparable outpouring in so short a time.

Though epidemics have played a major role in shaping American society, artistic production in response to devastating periodic outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, and influenza (not to mention consumption) has been all but indifferent. There is no great American novel about the “Spanish Lady” that killed millions in the years following World War I; no revered poem or play commemorating the evacuation of a major American city due to rampaging disease; no major motion picture about the polio epidemic that swept the nation in the 1950s. Nothing in American literature is comparable to the preoccupation with pestilence that had inspired great works of European realism by writers as diverse as Defoe, Ibsen, Mann, and Camus. Taken as a whole, American culture's response to epidemics—from Edgar Allan Poe's “Masque of the Red Death” to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith and Hollywood melodramas like Jezebel— has been romantic and didactic.