The Plague: Writing, Publication and Circulation

Albert Camus's The Plague was published by Gallimard in Paris in 1947. Tony Judt's introduction notes that Camus gathered material in Oran in 1941 and continued working on the manuscript while recuperating in France in 1942. Its composition extended across the war years.

Klaus Stoevesandt's research adds that Camus, suffering from tuberculosis, stayed at Le Panelier while his wife returned to teach in Oran. Changes in the war in November prevented reunion. Illness and separation were therefore both subjects of the book and parts of his experience. After France's liberation, Camus also edited Combat. By the novel's completion, he was no longer the relatively little-known young writer of the pre-war period.

References: [2] [5]

Lina Patricia Villate Torres's doctoral thesis surveys the writing materials. Drawing on Camus's letter to Jean Grenier of 15 October 1942, she notes that he prepared historical and medical sources without intending a documentary report. She lists Adrien Proust's work on epidemic prevention, disease manuals and historical accounts. The novel's credibility came from selected reading, not simply renaming the author's own illness.

The manuscript's structure also changed. According to the study, a 1943 version juxtaposed Rieux's records, Tarrou's notebooks and the diary of classics teacher Philippe Stephan. Stephan considered plague narratives by Thucydides and Lucretius, but disappeared in revision, with some characteristics passing to others and the narrative centre shifting to Dr Rieux. This placed the observer's explanations behind practical aid, gradually giving the theme of collective resistance an appropriate narrative form.

References: [6]

The final novel has five parts, moving from dead rats and Oran's closure through the epidemic's peak and decline to reopening. The narrator initially conceals his identity and claims to draw on personal experience, testimony and written material, revealing at the end that he is Dr Bernard Rieux. Tarrou's notebooks and everyday city life enter the account, bringing individual voices into a shared record. The opening dates Oran only to the nineteen-forties; publication year is not the story's year.

Characters' choices express the themes. Tarrou organizes volunteer sanitary squads, Grand keeps statistics, and Rambert initially wants to leave to rejoin his lover but ultimately stays to help. Rieux still recognizes private happiness as valuable; sacrifice is not presented as the only legitimate motive. The death of Othon's son confronts abstract explanations with innocent suffering. Around the reopening, Tarrou's death and news of Rieux's wife's death place private loss alongside public celebration. The final warning of disaster's possible return ends with continuing vigilance rather than permanent victory.

References: [1]

When the novel appeared, French society was reassessing occupation, collaboration and resistance. Judt argues that its timing in 1947 allowed a fictional epidemic to revisit painful history without directly adopting partisan polemic. He contrasts its sympathy for ordinary people with heroic post-war narratives of resistance. This is a historian's interpretation, not a survey of contemporary readers.

French publication did not end the edition history. The electronic transcription of a surviving 1955 printing identifies both the work's 1947 publication and the printing date of 22 August 1955. Distinguishing first edition, later printing and digital transcription locates the text being read accurately and avoids mistaking a reprint date for its first public appearance.

References: [1] [5]

In 1948, the American Partisan Review was already reviewing Knopf's The Plague and expressly discussing Stuart Gilbert's translation. More than half a century later, Robin Buss's new English translation appeared from Allen Lane in 2001 and entered Penguin Classics in 2002. These dates belong respectively to the French original, an early English version and a new translation, not a single publication year.

The Buss edition added Judt's historical introduction and notes explaining French administrative terminology at the opening and Algeria's administrative relationship with France at the time. Translators and editors therefore also supplied later readers with context.

References: [3] [7]

In September 1948, James Burnham reviewed The Plague alongside Simone de Beauvoir's The Blood of Others. He praised Camus's disciplined, conventional organization and described Gilbert's syntax as complete and restrained. Early English-language reception thus evaluated the novel as a specific literary form.

Burnham nevertheless opposed reading it solely as a one-to-one allegory of Nazi-occupied France. He also criticized overly explicit moral explanation, arguing that Camus could have trusted the story's own force more. He noted the absence of a single hero or wholly unified standpoint. Formal appreciation coexisted with reservations about argumentation; early reception cannot be reduced to unanimous acclaim.

References: [3]

In a letter to Roland Barthes dated 11 January 1955 and subsequently published in Club, Camus explicitly identified European resistance to Nazism as an important element while emphasizing meaning beyond one tyranny. He described the movement from The Stranger to The Plague as a shift from solitary rebellion to participation in collective struggle, using Rambert's choice to answer charges of political isolation.

The letter also identifies the core disagreement: might disease as allegory weaken questions of historical responsibility for human oppression? Camus insisted that multiple levels of interpretation could coexist with concrete resistance experience. Alongside Burnham's reservations about didacticism, these materials show that circulation not only enlarged readership but exposed the novel's historical reference, moral positions and form to continuing scrutiny.

References: [4] [3]