The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of medical workers finding solidarity in their labor as the Algerian city of Oran is swept by a plague. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

Albert Camus (7 November 1913 —4 January 1960) was a French pied-noir author, journalist, and philosopher. Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times. He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.

Amazon.com Review:

The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it.