The Plague

CAMUS, Albert.

The Plague.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST PRINTING — IN A LATER-ISSUE JACKET. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.

Octavo. 278 pp. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert. "First American Edition" stated on the copyright page, with no later printings indicated. Original black cloth, a blind-stamped vignette of a hooded grim reaper to the front board, gilt-lettered and decorated spine, top edge stained, deckled fore and tail edges. Jacket design by Jean Carlu. In a later-issue dust jacket priced $3.50, unclipped: its rear flap lists The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus (Knopf's English editions of 1954 and 1955), placing the jacket around 1955 or later, wrapped on remaining first-edition stock. Book very good; jacket very good with light wear, the price intact.

Camus's masterpiece — the novel that made him a world figure and weighed heavily in the case for his 1957 Nobel Prize. La Peste first appeared in French from Gallimard in 1947, but Camus had been at work on it for years: his notebooks record early notes toward "the redeeming plague" in 1941, and he reworked the manuscript through the war, much of it written in occupied southern France while his wife Francine was cut off from him in Algeria. He drew on the historical plague visitations at Oran and set the novel in the 1940s.

SKU TO-2026-013