An Assessment Of Twentieth Century Literature  

"In France the best recent allegory of man’s resistance against the power of evil, and the evil of power is Albert Camus’s The Plague. The symbol there is again the city — a plague-stricken city, and Camus takes his justification for this use of allegory from our own Daniel Defoe — from that Robinson Crusoe which he once described as an allegory of his own life. “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another,” wrote Defoe, “as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”--An Assessment Of Twentieth Century Literature (1951) by Isaacs J