Suddenly one April the rats in Oran came out of cellars and sewers, first singly and then in tens and hundreds, to die in the streets. At first the citizens of Oran refused to connect this with the mounting human death rate. But finally the implications had to be acknowledged; the Prefect telegraphed: Proclaim a state of plague stop close the town.

A doctor, a journalist, a minor government official, a criminal avoiding the police, and a priest are among those imprisoned by the plague. Their reactions vary according to the character and philosophy of each: commitment to the human struggle, panic, unquestioning action, philosophic justification.

In its searching, symbolic exploration of the human conscience, The Plague is the most important novel to have come out of postwar Europe. It is a classic not only of the twentieth century, but ranks with the great novels of all time.

ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913; his death on January 4,1960, cut short the career of the most important literary figure of the Western world. Camus spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he began writing and doing work in the the-ter before he was twenty, and then journalism took him to metropolitan France. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the theatrical company L'Equipe, and during the war he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of the underground newspaper, Combat. In occupied France in 1942 he pub-lished the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus and the novel The Stranger. Among his other major writings are the essay The Rebel (published here in 1954), his plays (1958), and three novels: The Plague (1948), The Fall (1957), and Exile and the Kingdom (1958). A collection of his essays, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, was published posthumously in 1961.

When Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, the official citation accompanying this highest honor said that he was selected because of "his important literary production, which with clearsighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."