Albert Camus

Biography

Who Was Albert Camus?

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, French Algeria, into a poor working-class family; his father died in the First World War before Camus turned one, and his mother, who was partially deaf and illiterate, raised him in conditions of considerable hardship. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, worked as a journalist, and during the Second World War became an editor of Combat, the clandestine newspaper of the French Resistance.

Camus is most often classed as an existentialist, a label he firmly rejected. The philosophy he articulated and developed – absurdism – holds that human beings possess an inbuilt need for meaning and order, while the universe offers only silence. The absurd, for Camus, is not a property of the world or of human consciousness taken separately, but the collision between the two. His novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), along with his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), work out the consequences of this collision and the forms of life – revolt, freedom, passion – that he believed could be built upon it without illusion.

Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at the age of forty-four, one of the youngest recipients in the prize's history. He died in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six. Camus is significant for TLA because his fiction stages, with unusual clarity, what it looks like when a serious moral imagination refuses the very ground – a meaningful cosmos, a providential order – that its own moral seriousness seems to require. The Plague in particular is populated by characters whose solidarity, courage, and care for the dying carry a weight that Camus's stated atheism cannot, on its own terms, explain.

Notable Quotes

In Their Own Words

Key Works

Selected Bibliography

• The Stranger – 1942
• The Myth of Sisyphus – 1942
• The Plague – 1947
• The Rebel – 1951
• The Fall – 1956

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