Albert Camus

Albert Camus wrote novels, essays, plays and journalism about one persistent problem: how to live honestly when the world does not supply a clear meaning. The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus present that problem through fiction and argument; The Plague and The Rebel ask what responsibility to other people follows from it.

Camus is often called an existentialist, but he rejected that label and argued with leading existentialists. The more precise route into his work is through his own terms: the absurd, revolt, limits and solidarity. His books do not offer a system. They test ways of acting when certainty is unavailable.

Algeria, poverty and the first books

Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi in French-ruled Algeria. His father died from wounds received in the First World War. His mother, Catherine Sintès Camus, raised Albert and his brother in a working-class household in Belcourt, Algiers. A teacher, Louis Germain, helped him continue his education; tuberculosis interrupted the football and academic career he had imagined.

The Mediterranean landscape and the inequality of colonial Algeria both remained central to his writing. The early essay collections The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Nuptials hold sunlight, poverty, physical pleasure and death together without treating any one of them as an answer to the others.

Paris, resistance and Combat

Camus moved to metropolitan France at twenty-five. During the German occupation he joined the Resistance newspaper Combat, first working clandestinely and then becoming one of its best-known editorial voices after the Liberation. The journalism matters to the books: its demand for plain evidence, limited power and individual responsibility runs through his later arguments against political murder.

In 1942 Gallimard published both The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus described fiction, essay and drama as connected cycles rather than isolated titles. Caligula and The Misunderstanding belong to the first, absurd cycle; The Plague, The Rebel and The Just Assassins move toward revolt and the limits placed on violence.

The argument over revolt

The Rebel, published in 1951, argues that resistance to oppression creates a shared human value but can betray itself when revolution makes murder a method. The book caused a public break with Jean-Paul Sartre's circle. Camus's anti-Communism and his account of revolution remain influential, but they also require scrutiny: critics note the gap between the book's sweeping European history and the colonial violence of his own time.

His position during the Algerian War was especially difficult and contested. He condemned terrorism against civilians and called for a civilian truce, while rejecting both the existing colonial injustice and the full independence program of the National Liberation Front. The position satisfied neither side and cannot be reduced to a slogan without losing the conflict between his attachments, his principles and the political reality.

Nobel Prize and an unfinished last book

Camus received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at forty-four. The award cited writing that illuminated problems of the human conscience. By then The Fall had turned his moral inquiry inward through an unreliable confession, and Exile and the Kingdom had returned to Algeria through six stories of isolation and failed connection.

He died on 4 January 1960 in a car crash near Villeblevin. He was forty-six. The manuscript of The First Man was recovered from the wreck and published in 1994. Its direct account of a poor Algerian childhood changed the shape of the finished career: the last book became a return to the life before the theories and public arguments.