The Plague
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"The Plague" is a French novel by Albert Camus that uses a fictional outbreak of plague in an Algerian city as the backdrop for exploring how people respond to absurd and catastrophic circumstances. The book matters because it has become a widely-read meditation on human suffering, solidarity, and the search for meaning in an indifferent world.
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Book · Open Library
- Author
- Jack London
- First published
- 1910
- Editions
- 71
- Subjects
- Fiction, American Science fiction, Plague, End of the world, Classic Literature, Science Fiction, American literature, Regression (Civilization)
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Article
The Plague (French: La Peste) is a 1947 absurdist novel by Albert Camus. The plot centers around the French Algerian city of Oran as it combats a plague outbreak and is put under a city-wide quarantine. The novel presents a snapshot into life in Oran as seen through Camus's absurdist lens.
Camus used as source material the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran's population in 1849, but set the novel in the 1940s. Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease several times before Camus published his novel. According to an academic study, Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921: 185 cases; 1931: 76 cases; and 1944: 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.
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1846–1860 cholera pandemic1947 French novelsAbsurdist fictionBooks with atheism-related themesÉditions Gallimard booksExistentialist novelsFirst-person narrative novelsFrench novels adapted for radioFrench novels adapted into filmsFrench novels adapted into playsFrench philosophical novelsHealth in Algeria