The Plague

Albert Camus's 1947 novel — about a bubonic plague outbreak in Oran, Algeria — which became a metaphor for Nazi occupation and reads now as the definitive novel about collective response to epidemic disease.

Creates the collective response to catastrophe novel — The Plague's account of how an isolated city responds to an epidemic (denial, panic, solidarity, heroism, collapse, exhaustion) is the most complete fictional anatomy of collective catastrophe; its allegorical resonance (Nazi occupation, COVID) makes it perpetually contemporary.