Fever 1793
Laurie Halse Anderson (2000)
“A fourteen-year-old girl must grow up overnight when yellow fever turns Philadelphia — the nation's capital — into a city of the dead.”
At a Glance
In the summer of 1793, fourteen-year-old Matilda 'Mattie' Cook lives above her mother's coffeehouse in Philadelphia, dreaming of wealth and dodging chores. When yellow fever strikes the city, Mattie's world collapses: her mother falls ill, her grandfather dies on the road north, and she herself barely survives the disease. Alone and orphaned in all but name, Mattie rescues an orphan named Nell, reunites with the free Black cook Eliza and the heroic members of the Free African Society, and ultimately rebuilds the coffeehouse — and herself — from the wreckage the epidemic leaves behind.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Fever 1793 brought the 1793 Philadelphia epidemic into the young adult canon at a moment when historical fiction for teenagers was dominated by war narratives and frontier stories. Anderson's decision to center an epidemic — and to center the Free African Society's role within it — introduced millions of young readers to a historical event that most American history textbooks either omit or reduce to a footnote. The novel became even more culturally significant during the COVID-19 pandemic, when teachers and students discovered that a book published in 2000 about an epidemic in 1793 described their own experience with uncanny precision.
Diction Profile
Conversational with period vocabulary woven naturally into a modern young-adult narrative voice
Moderate