In 1948 memories of Nazi terror were vivid, and The Plague contains scenes that could have been lifted straight from those wartime memories: painful separations from loved ones, attempts to escape the war zone, the formation of isolation camps for the contaminated, the smell of dead and burning bodies. "There will be few readers," a Herald Tribune reviewer contended, "who will not see in it a parable of the condition of all mankind, especially during the recent war." Time relied on The Plague when analyzing the French Resistance: "To continue upholding one's human obligations when there seems the least possibility of fulfilling them is, if not heroism, the best that men can do."

Camus once described himself as committed to "everyday life with the most possible light thrown upon it." Long after the priest's sermons on faith and fatalism have faded from our memory of the book, what...