Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi (now Drean), a small farming town in eastern Algeria, to Lucien Camus, an agricultural worker of Alsatian descent, and Catherine Sintès, an illiterate Spanish-Algerian woman. His father died at the First Battle of the Marne on 11 October 1914, before Camus turned one. The family — Camus, his brother Lucien, his mother and grandmother — moved to the Belcourt working-class district of Algiers, living in a two-room apartment without electricity or running water. Catherine Camus, partially deaf and barely able to speak, cleaned houses and offices for a living. It was his primary school teacher, Louis Germain, who recognized Camus's exceptional intelligence and persuaded the family to let him sit the scholarship examination for the Lycée. Camus won; decades later, when he accepted the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1957, he dedicated it in part to Germain. At the Lycée d'Alger he came under the influence of Jean Grenier, a philosopher and writer who introduced him to classical literature and existentialist thought. But tuberculosis, first diagnosed in 1930 when Camus was seventeen, ended his ambitions to take the agrégation examination; the disease would recur throughout his life and made him feel, he wrote, like a man under sentence of death who had simply been told the date. He enrolled at the University of Algiers to study philosophy, joined and left the Algerian Communist Party between 1935 and 1937, and worked as an actor, playwright, and journalist. His political journalism for the Alger Républicain in the late 1930s, covering the poverty of the Kabylie Berber region, demonstrated both his outrage at colonial injustice and the clarity of his prose. In Paris during the occupation, Camus edited the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat and wrote its editorials. The two works that made his name appeared within weeks of each other in 1942: L'Étranger (The Stranger), a short novel narrated by Meursault, an emotionally detached European Algerian who kills an Arab on a beach and goes to the guillotine more troubled by the sun and the crowd's noise than by his own death; and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), the philosophical essay that gave the novel its framework. Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down — and Camus insists we must imagine Sisyphus happy. The absurd, he argued, arises from the collision between the human demand for meaning and the world's silence; the only honest response is not suicide (which concedes defeat) nor religious faith (which is philosophical cowardice) but revolt — full, clear-eyed engagement with life. La Peste (The Plague, 1947), set in an Algerian city under quarantine from bubonic plague, extended the absurdist philosophy into a meditation on solidarity, resistance, and mortality that made an unmistakable allegory of the Nazi occupation. The Fall (La Chute, 1956) was his last completed novel: a monologue by a Parisian lawyer who confesses, to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar, his failure to act when a woman jumped from a bridge. His rupture with Sartre, played out in Les Temps Modernes in 1952, centred on Camus's refusal to endorse revolutionary violence as a means of historical progress; Sartre's review of The Rebel was withering and the friendship ended. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1957 — at forty-three, the second youngest laureate in the prize's history. His acceptance speech in Stockholm, 'The Artist and His Time,' remains one of the most lucid statements of the writer's political and moral responsibility. On 4 January 1960, Camus was killed when the car driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard, returning from Lourmarin in Provence to Paris, hit a plane tree near Sens and wrapped itself around it. His manuscript for an autobiographical novel, The First Man, was found in the wreckage. He was forty-six. He is buried in the churchyard at Lourmarin, the Provençal village where he had lived and worked since 1958.

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