Sales of Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague (La Peste) were spiking. Everyone was buying it. Rereading The Plague over these past weeks has been an uncanny experience.

In 1948, Stephen Spender wrote for the Book Review about Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” a novel about an epidemic spreading across the French Algerian city of Oran.

Camus died in 1960, at the age of 46, in a car accident. He was headed to Paris. The author had a “train ticket” in his pocket, but had decided not to use it.

In 1947, French author Albert Camus published "The Plague" ("La peste"), a novel about an epidemic of bubonic plague in the city of Oran in Algeria. The book remains in print today. Camus won the ...

Writing “The Plague” during the decimation of World War II, Albert Camus used disease as a metaphor for war — but also for war’s remedy.

In January 1941, Albert Camus began work on a story about a virus that spreads uncontrollably from animals to humans and ends up destroying half the population of “an ordinary town” called ...

Hmm. One spring a highly contagious disease arrives in a community. The authorities try to keep it quiet. But soon people are sick and dying. As quarantines are imposed, the ...

The literary calamity closest to the current world-wide pandemic was described by Albert Camus in “The Plague” (1947), set in the Algerian city of Oran.