The novel chronicles the daily life of the inhabitants during an epidemic of plague which struck the city and the cup of the outside world. Camus seems to have documented himself on a small epidemic of bubonic plague, which occurred in Oran in 1945, succeeding a more serious epidemic which had taken place in Algiers in 1944, but his project predates the appearance of these epidemics, since he has been thinking about it since April 1941, as evidenced by his Notebooks, where he speaks of "the liberating plague" and notes some ideas