"The Plague" (French: La Peste) is a major
novel by French novelist and non-fiction writer Albert Camus. He was awarded the 1957 Novel Prize for Literature.
The story is being told by Dr Rieux who is with a group of other fellow intellectuals. It tells about the medical workers who find a certain unity among themselves when a plague destroys Oran, their Algerian town.
As a result of the plague, the citizens are quarantined from the
outside world. The people try their best to cope with their devastation and tragedy, either giving up and submitting to fate by helplessly
suffering, while others hold on to the outward manifestation of the outside world through religion and other city ordinances.
Each intellectual expresses his own belief of death and the reality of the plague's existence which has to be endured and accepted as a natural calamity, at the same time reflecting on it as a philosophical buffer, extending their thinking about the world, and their relationship with it - the nature of destiny and apparent human conditions.
Despite the objection of Camus to the contrary, "The Plague" is still considered an existentialist novel.