A Journal of the Plague Year is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...

, first published in March 1722

1722 in literature

The year 1722 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Voltaire and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau meet and quarrel at Brussels.* Ten-year-old Jean-Jacques Rousseau is abandoned by his father, Isaac....

.

The novel is a fictionalised account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague

Great Plague of London

The Great Plague was a massive outbreak of disease in the Kingdom of England that killed an estimated 100,000 people, 20% of London's population. The disease is identified as bubonic plague, an infection by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted through a flea vector...

 struck the city of London. The book is told roughly chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings.

Although it purports to have been written only a few years after the event, it actually was written in the years just prior to the book's first publication in March 1722.