Albert Camus. Illustrations de Edy Legrand - La peste - 1962

2 volumes in 4to. Softcover bound, with full-color illustrations by Edy Legrand on all covers and the spine. Copy 1362/10000.
12 full-page color illustrations.
The interior is perfectly preserved. The exterior is slightly scuffed (see photos).
Camus provided an unpublished introduction to these volumes in which he explained what Edy Legrand had understood about The Plague.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French philosopher, writer, activist journalist, novelist, playwright, essayist, and short-story writer, and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
His body of work includes plays, novels, short stories, films, poems and essays in which he develops a skeptical and lucid humanism based on the awareness of the absurd, the human condition, and revolt. This revolt leads to action and the search for justice, thereby giving meaning to the world and to existence. Camus's work contributed to the dissemination of the philosophy of the absurd. Although he is sometimes linked to existentialism, Camus has always refused to be reduced to that movement.

Internationalist reformist, moralist, abolitionist, close to libertarian currents, he takes a stance on the independence of Algeria and on its relations with the Algerian Communist Party, which he leaves after two years. He denounces the inequalities and misery affecting the Berber populations of North Africa, notably the Kabyles, while opposing the stereotypes of the pied-noir exploiters. He also defends Spanish antifascist exiles, victims of Stalinism, and conscientious objectors. On the margins of philosophical currents, Camus defines himself above all as “a witness of his time” and fights against ideologies and abstractions that divert from humanity. He thus opposes liberalism, existentialism, and Marxism. The publication of The Rebel in 1951, where he criticizes the legitimization of violence and adopts an anti-Soviet position, earns him the hostility of communist intellectuals and marks his rift with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Inspired by the theme of the absurd and published in 1947, The Plague received the Critics' Prize the same year. It belongs to the "cycle of revolt" grouping two other works by Camus: The Rebel and The Just.
Camus narrates in this novel the daily life of the inhabitants of Oran in the 1940s, faced with a plague epidemic that hits them head-on and cuts them off from the outside world.

Edy-Legrand (1892-1970) was a French illustrator, engraver, and painter.

The first part of his career took place in advertising and literary illustration. Later, his work established his reputation as a painter.
He began exhibiting in the early 1920s at the Salon d'Automne, of which he was a member, at the Salon des indépendants and at the Société des artistes décorateurs, as well as a notable exhibition at Galerie Weill from March 1922 to April 1923.
He participated in the Art Institute of Chicago's first universal exhibition of engraved works in 1932, where he represented France. Displayed alongside Picasso, Matisse, and Derain, he was the only one to receive an honorable mention.

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