French Algerian novelist, essayist, journalist and playwright who used the absurd and revolt to ask how people should live without false consolation.
Albert Camus was a French writer, born in Algeria, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at forty-four.[1] He was born at Mondovi in French Algeria on 7 November 1913 and died in a car crash at Villeblevin, in central France, on 4 January 1960, aged forty-six.
He is best known for The Outsider, a short novel published in 1942 about a man who shoots an Arab on an Algiers beach and is condemned as much for not crying at his mother's funeral as for the killing.
His subject was the absurd: the gap between people's need for meaning and a universe that supplies none. His answer was not despair. In The Myth of Sisyphus he argues that a man condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever can still be imagined happy, because the task is his and he knows exactly what he is doing.
He grew up in poverty in Algiers and played in goal for a local football team until tuberculosis stopped him at seventeen. During the German occupation of France he edited the underground Resistance paper Combat, and in 1952 he broke publicly with Jean-Paul Sartre over commun[2]ism and political violence.
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 at Mondovi, a village in French Algeria. His father, Lucien, a farm labourer, was called up in 1914 and died of wounds from the Battle of the Marne when Camus was less than a year old.
His mother, Catherine, was of Spanish descent, partly deaf, and could not read or write. She cleaned houses. Camus grew up with her, his brother and his grandmother in a two-room flat in Belcourt, a working-class district of Algiers, with no electricity and no running water.
He was, on his own account, poor and happy: the sun, the sea and football filled a childhood that had almost nothing else in it. He wrote about that combination of poverty and physical pleasure for the rest of his life.
A schoolteacher, Louis Germain, spotted him and pushed him towards a scholarship. Camus dedicated his Nobel speech to him and wrote to thank him when the prize was announced.
Camus played in goal for the junior team of Racing Universitaire d'Alger. He said afterwards that everything he knew about morality he had learned from football.
In 1930, at seventeen, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It ended the football, interrupted his studies repeatedly, kept him out of the army in 1939, and recurred throughout his life.
He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, writing a thesis on the relations between Greek thought and early Christianity, and supported himself with a series of jobs.
In the 1930s Camus worked in the theatre in Algiers, founding a company that staged Malraux, Gide and adaptations of his own. He wrote plays throughout his life: Caligula and The Misunderstanding belong with the absurd cycle, and The Just Assassins with the later work on rebellion. His early essay collections, The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Nuptials, came out of the same Algiers years. He joined the Communist Party in 1935 and was expelled or resigned about two years later over the party's shifting line on Algerian nationalism.
He became a journalist on Alger républicain, a left-wing paper, and in 1939 published a long investigation into famine and colonial administration in the Kabylia region. The reporting was hard enough on the authorities to make him unemployable in Algeria, and the paper was closed.
He moved to France in 1940 and worked on Paris-Soir. He was in Paris when the Germans arrived, and left with the paper for Clermont-Ferrand and then Lyon.
The Outsider was published in 1942, when Camus was twenty-eight. Its narrator, Meursault, an Algiers clerk, does not cry at his mother's funeral, begins an affair the next day, and later shoots an Arab man on a beach in the sun. At his trial the prosecution concentrates on the funeral.
The novel is written in short flat sentences with no explanation of the narrator's feelings, which is what made it read as new. Meursault will not pretend to feel what he does not feel, and the court destroys him for it.
The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay published the same year, sets out the philosophy directly. People demand that life mean something; the universe is silent; the collision of the two is the absurd. Camus rejects both suicide and religious faith as ways out, and proposes instead living with full awareness of the contradiction. The essay ends by asking the reader to imagine Sisyphus, condemned to push his rock uphill forever, as happy.
Camus joined the French Resistance in occupied Paris and by 1943 was editing its underground newspaper, Combat, which was printed and distributed illegally.
After the Liberation, Combat became a legal daily and Camus its editor-in-chief, writing the front-page editorials. For two or three years he was one of the most widely read moral voices in France, arguing about the collaboration trials and the death penalty. In August 1945 he wrote against the atomic bomb within days of Hiroshima, almost alone in the French press.
The Plague, published in 1947, describes an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran. It follows the quarantine, the mounting deaths, and the ordinary people — a doctor, a clerk, a journalist, a priest — who organise sanitary squads and keep working.
The Plague was read at once as an allegory of the German occupation, and Camus did not object. It is also a literal account of an epidemic, which is why it sold in enormous numbers again in 2020.
The book's position is that there are no heroes, only people who do the job in front of them. Its main character, the doctor Rieux, says that fighting the plague is not heroism but common decency, and that his job is simply his job.
Camus and Sartre were friends from 1943, allies after the Liberation, and the two names most associated with existentialism in the public mind, though Camus denied being an existentialist.
In 1951 Camus published The Rebel, a long essay arguing that revolutions which justify murder in the name of a future paradise become the thing they overthrew, and that this applied to the Soviet Union. In 1952 Les Temps modernes, the review Sartre edited, ran a hostile review of it. Camus replied at length, addressing his letter to the editor rather than to Sartre by name. Sartre answered personally and savagely, in print.
The friendship ended there. The disagreement was real and specific: whether political violence can be justified by its aims. Sartre held that revolutionary violence could be justified for the present; Camus held that it could not. Later history has been kinder to Camus's position than his contemporaries were.
The Algerian war of independence began in 1954, and it put Camus in an impossible position. He was a Frenchman born in Algeria to poor settlers, opposed to the existing colonial injustice and equally opposed to the full independence programme of the National Liberation Front, whose campaign was killing civilians.
He called for a civilian truce in Algiers in January 1956 and was shouted down by both sides. After that he mostly stopped speaking publicly about it, and worked privately to save condemned Algerians from execution.
At a press conference in Stockholm in 1957, pressed by an Algerian student, he said that he had always condemned terror, and that if it were used against his own family he would choose his mother's safety over justice. The sentence, usually quoted in shorter form, was used against him for decades.
Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1957, aged forty-three, the second-youngest winner of the literature prize. The citation praised writing that illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times. His speech argued that a writer's job is to serve those who suffer history rather than those who make it.
On 4 January 1960 he was killed instantly when the car he was travelling in, driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard, left the road and hit a tree at Villeblevin, south of Paris. He was forty-six. An unused train ticket was found in his pocket; he had intended to travel by rail.
The manuscript of an unfinished novel, The First Man, was in the wreckage. It is an autobiographical book about his childhood in Algiers and the father he never knew, and his daughter published it in 1994, thirty-four years later.
Camus made a hard philosophical position readable. The Outsider and The Plague are short, clear novels that carry an argument about meaning, death and duty without any technical vocabulary, and they are read by people who would never open a philosophy book.
He also took political positions that later opinion has endorsed. He opposed the death penalty, opposed the atomic bomb from the week it was used, opposed Soviet camps when much of the French left would not, and refused to accept that a good end justified killing. That cost him his most important friendship and a large part of his reputation among Paris intellectuals, and it is now the part of his record that looks strongest.
Gallimard published both The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, and remained his publisher for the rest of his life. His one collection of short fiction, Exile and the Kingdom, published in 1957, gathers six stories of isolation and failed connection, most of them set in Algeria.
Born on 7 November at Mondovi in French Algeria, the second son of Lucien Camus, a farm labourer, and Catherine Sintès, who was partly deaf and could not read or write.
His father is called up and dies of wounds from the Battle of the Marne. Camus is less than a year old.
Grows up in a two-room flat in Belcourt, a working-class district of Algiers, with his mother, brother and grandmother, without electricity or running water.
His schoolteacher Louis Germain spots his ability and pushes him towards a scholarship to the lycée.
Plays in goal for the junior team of Racing Universitaire d'Alger.
Is diagnosed with tuberculosis at seventeen. It ends his football, interrupts his studies and recurs throughout his life.
Enters the University of Algiers to study philosophy.
Marries Simone Hié. The marriage lasts about two years.
Joins the Communist Party and founds a theatre company in Algiers.
Completes his thesis on the relations between Greek thought and early Christianity.
Leaves the Communist Party over its shifting line on Algerian nationalism. Publishes his first book, L'Envers et l'Endroit.
Becomes a journalist on the left-wing paper Alger républicain.
Publishes a long investigation into famine and colonial administration in Kabylia. The reporting makes him unemployable in Algeria and the paper is closed.
Moves to France and works on Paris-Soir. Marries Francine Faure.
Publishes The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus.
Joins the French Resistance in Paris and begins editing its underground newspaper, Combat.
Paris is liberated. Combat becomes a legal daily with Camus as editor-in-chief, writing the front-page editorials.
Writes against the atomic bomb within days of Hiroshima, almost alone in the French press. His twin children, Catherine and Jean, are born.
Publishes The Plague, which is read at once as an allegory of the occupation.
Serves on the founding patronage committee of the review Présence Africaine.
Suffers a serious recurrence of tuberculosis and spends two years largely out of public life.
Publishes The Rebel, arguing that revolutions which justify murder become what they overthrew.
Les Temps modernes attacks The Rebel. Camus replies and Sartre answers savagely in print. The friendship ends.
The Algerian war of independence begins.
Calls for a civilian truce at a public meeting in Algiers in January and is shouted down by both sides. Publishes The Fall.
Publishes Exile and the Kingdom and a long essay against the death penalty. Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in October at forty-three.
At a Stockholm press conference, pressed by an Algerian student, says that he would defend his mother before justice. The remark is used against him for decades.
Directs his own adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed in Paris and begins the autobiographical novel The First Man.
Killed on 4 January when the car driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard leaves the road at Villeblevin and hits a tree. He is forty-six. An unused train ticket is in his pocket.
A Happy Death, an early novel written before The Outsider, is published.
The First Man, the unfinished manuscript found in the wreckage, is published by his daughter thirty-four years after his death.
The Plague returns to bestseller lists worldwide during the coronavirus pandemic.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating.
How Albert appears in its pages: The letters' 'I' — Camus during the German occupation of France, writing from inside the French Resistance. He was thirty in 1943 when he wrote the first of the four letters, working as a reader for Gallimard and editing the clandestine Resistance paper Combat.
How Albert appears in its pages: The essays' 'I' — Camus in his mid-twenties, born and living in Algiers, working as a journalist for Alger républicain and writing evenings and weekends. He was twenty-six when Charlot published Noces in 1939.
How Albert appears in its pages: The essay's 'I' — Camus at twenty-eight, working on The Myth of Sisyphus alongside The Stranger and Caligula in what he called his 'cycle of the absurd.' He wrote most of the book in occupied France in 1940–41.
How Albert appears in its pages: The essay's 'I' — Camus at thirty-eight, at the peak of his postwar reputation, working out the political argument that The Plague had dramatised four years earlier. The book would end his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 after a hostile review in Les Temps modernes.
How Albert appears in its pages: The essays' 'I' — Camus at twenty-three, working as a journalist in Algiers and publishing his first book through his classmate Edmond Charlot's small Algiers press. The five essays draw directly on his own biography.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Sartre first met in occupied Paris in 1943, at the June opening of Sartre's play The Flies. They became close through the Resistance and post-Liberation Left Bank years, appeared together in the founding circle around Les Temps modernes, and broke publicly in 1952 after a hostile review of The Rebel in the journal. The friendship ended and was never repaired; Camus died in 1960 with the break unresolved.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Beauvoir met in the Left Bank Resistance circles around Sartre in 1943, and remained frequent debating partners through the postwar years. Beauvoir's third memoir volume Force of Circumstance (1963) is one of the closest first-person accounts of Camus's Paris years and of the 1952 break with Sartre over The Rebel, which she witnessed at close range.
Met · 1941
Camus and Malraux first met in Marseille in 1941 through Pascal Pia, who had shown Malraux the manuscript of The Stranger. Malraux read the novel, wrote a favourable report to Gaston Gallimard, and effectively opened the doors of the Gallimard editorial board to Camus. The two men remained on friendly, respectful terms through the postwar years and Camus regarded Malraux — with Gide — as one of the two most important living French novelists.
Met · 1946–1960
Camus and Char first met in Paris in 1946 through Gallimard and became the closest personal friends either man had in their later lives. They shared a small house at L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse where Char lived and Camus visited repeatedly. When Camus was killed in the January 1960 car crash, Char wrote the elegy 'Il nous a devancés' — 'He has gone ahead of us' — for the memorial service.
Camus discovered Gide as an adolescent in Algiers and named him repeatedly as the French moralist whose responsibility-of-the-writer position mattered most to his own. Camus's 1957 Nobel lecture in Stockholm — delivered when he was forty-three, the second-youngest winner of the literature prize — deliberately echoed the position Gide had taken in his own 1947 Nobel address ten years earlier. Camus met Gide once in Paris shortly before Gide's death in 1951.
Camus argued with Dostoevsky for twenty years. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) sets Kirilov of The Possessed beside Don Juan and the actor as a figure of the absurd, takes his suicide-to-prove-freedom seriously and refuses its conclusion. Then he staged him: Camus adapted Les Possédés for the theatre and directed his own version at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris in 1959, the last full year of his life. The sources document the reading and the adaptation directly; calling it influence is our reading of them, which is why the evidence is marked inferred.
It is short, direct, and introduces the conflict between human demands for meaning and an indifferent world without requiring philosophical background.
Five early essays in which poverty, silence, sunlight and death already form the vocabulary of the later books.
Four Mediterranean essays about bodily happiness, ruins, summer and the refusal to postpone life.
Camus asks whether life is worth living when the universe supplies no final meaning.
A clerk in Algiers kills a man, then faces a court more interested in his behavior at his mother’s funeral.
An emperor turns the discovery that people die unhappy into a program of unlimited logical cruelty.
Four wartime letters distinguish love of one’s country from the nationalism that makes murder a virtue.
When Oran closes against an epidemic, ordinary people decide whether decency is enough.
Revolutionaries planning an assassination discover that a just cause does not settle what they may do.
A history and critique of rebellion that asks when resistance turns into justified murder.
In an Amsterdam bar, a former Paris lawyer confesses until confession becomes another form of control.
Six stories about people reaching toward belonging and finding that the distance remains.
Camus’s abandoned first novel follows a man who believes money can buy the time required for happiness.
The unfinished novel recovered after Camus’s death returns to his father, his mother and a poor childhood in Algiers.
Named by the city among the Saint-Germain gathering places Camus used, opposite the Flore and the Deux Magots on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
Visit the place
One of the Saint-Germain cafés Camus used, a minute from his hotel on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and part of the quarter's intellectual traffic through and after the Occupation.
Visit the place
Camus adapted Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun for the Théâtre des Mathurins in 1956 — one of several Paris theatres he worked in as an adapter and director as well as a novelist.
Visit the place
Camus moved to the Hôtel Madison, facing the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at the start of June 1940 — the month Paris fell — putting him at the junction that became the centre of postwar French intellectual life.
Visit the place
Camus directed a collection for Éditions Gallimard from its offices on the then rue Sébastien-Bottin — a working editor as well as the house's author.
Visit the place
Camus finished L'Étranger in a room at the Hôtel du Poirier, 16 rue Ravignan, in early May 1940 — aged twenty-six, largely unknown, and weeks before Paris fell. The hotel has since been demolished.
Visit the place
Depicted in · Book
Beauvoir's third memoir volume gives one of the closest first-person portraits of Camus in his Left Bank Resistance and postwar years — from Camus's first meeting with the Sartre-Beauvoir circle in 1943 through the public 1952 break over The Rebel to his death in the 1960 car crash. The book's account of the 1952 break is the most detailed contemporary source on the argument that ended the friendship.
— Ronald Aronson, Albert Camus
Member of · 1947
Camus sat on the founding patronage committee Alioune Diop assembled for the Présence Africaine review in 1947. The connection is institutional and documented; it does not imply agreement with every later position of the journal or its contributors.
A French writer born in Algeria in 1913, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at forty-three and died in a car crash in 1960 at forty-six. He wrote The Outsider, The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus.
The gap between people's need for life to mean something and a universe that offers no answer. Camus refuses both suicide and religious faith as ways out, and argues for living in full awareness of the contradiction. The Myth of Sisyphus ends by asking the reader to imagine a man condemned to roll a rock uphill forever as happy.
Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, does not cry at his mother's funeral, begins an affair the next day, and later shoots an Arab man on a beach. At his trial the prosecution concentrates on the funeral. He is condemned as much for refusing to perform grief as for the killing.
He said he was not, repeatedly. He is grouped with Sartre because they were friends, wrote at the same time and were read together, but Camus described his own subject as the absurd rather than existence, and the two men broke publicly in 1952.
Over whether political violence can be justified by its aims. Camus's 1951 essay The Rebel argued that revolutions which excuse murder in the name of a future paradise become what they overthrew, and applied that to the Soviet Union. Sartre's review attacked it, Camus replied, and Sartre answered personally and savagely in print.
In a car crash on 4 January 1960 at Villeblevin, south of Paris. The car, driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard, left the road and hit a tree. Camus was killed instantly at forty-six. He had a train ticket in his pocket and had meant to travel by rail. The manuscript of his unfinished novel The First Man was in the wreckage.
Member of · 1947
Camus sat on the founding patronage committee Alioune Diop assembled for the Présence Africaine review in 1947. The connection is institutional and documented; it does not imply agreement with every later position of the journal or its contributors.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Sartre first met in occupied Paris in 1943, at the June opening of Sartre's play The Flies. They became close through the Resistance and post-Liberation Left Bank years, appeared together in the founding circle around Les Temps modernes, and broke publicly in 1952 after a hostile review of The Rebel in the journal. The friendship ended and was never repaired; Camus died in 1960 with the break unresolved.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Beauvoir met in the Left Bank Resistance circles around Sartre in 1943, and remained frequent debating partners through the postwar years. Beauvoir's third memoir volume Force of Circumstance (1963) is one of the closest first-person accounts of Camus's Paris years and of the 1952 break with Sartre over The Rebel, which she witnessed at close range.
Met · 1941
Camus and Malraux first met in Marseille in 1941 through Pascal Pia, who had shown Malraux the manuscript of The Stranger. Malraux read the novel, wrote a favourable report to Gaston Gallimard, and effectively opened the doors of the Gallimard editorial board to Camus. The two men remained on friendly, respectful terms through the postwar years and Camus regarded Malraux — with Gide — as one of the two most important living French novelists.
Met · 1946–1960
Camus and Char first met in Paris in 1946 through Gallimard and became the closest personal friends either man had in their later lives. They shared a small house at L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse where Char lived and Camus visited repeatedly. When Camus was killed in the January 1960 car crash, Char wrote the elegy 'Il nous a devancés' — 'He has gone ahead of us' — for the memorial service.
Frequented
Named by the city among the Saint-Germain gathering places Camus used, opposite the Flore and the Deux Magots on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
Frequented
One of the Saint-Germain cafés Camus used, a minute from his hotel on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and part of the quarter's intellectual traffic through and after the Occupation.
Frequented · 1956
Camus adapted Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun for the Théâtre des Mathurins in 1956 — one of several Paris theatres he worked in as an adapter and director as well as a novelist.
Lived at · 1940
Camus finished L'Étranger in a room at the Hôtel du Poirier, 16 rue Ravignan, in early May 1940 — aged twenty-six, largely unknown, and weeks before Paris fell. The hotel has since been demolished.
Lived at · 1940
Camus moved to the Hôtel Madison, facing the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at the start of June 1940 — the month Paris fell — putting him at the junction that became the centre of postwar French intellectual life.
Worked at
Camus directed a collection for Éditions Gallimard from its offices on the then rue Sébastien-Bottin — a working editor as well as the house's author.
Influenced by
Camus discovered Gide as an adolescent in Algiers and named him repeatedly as the French moralist whose responsibility-of-the-writer position mattered most to his own. Camus's 1957 Nobel lecture in Stockholm — delivered when he was forty-three, the second-youngest winner of the literature prize — deliberately echoed the position Gide had taken in his own 1947 Nobel address ten years earlier. Camus met Gide once in Paris shortly before Gide's death in 1951.
Depicted in
Beauvoir's third memoir volume gives one of the closest first-person portraits of Camus in his Left Bank Resistance and postwar years — from Camus's first meeting with the Sartre-Beauvoir circle in 1943 through the public 1952 break over The Rebel to his death in the 1960 car crash. The book's account of the 1952 break is the most detailed contemporary source on the argument that ended the friendship.
Influenced by · 1942–1959
Camus argued with Dostoevsky for twenty years. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) sets Kirilov of The Possessed beside Don Juan and the actor as a figure of the absurd, takes his suicide-to-prove-freedom seriously and refuses its conclusion. Then he staged him: Camus adapted Les Possédés for the theatre and directed his own version at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris in 1959, the last full year of his life. The sources document the reading and the adaptation directly; calling it influence is our reading of them, which is why the evidence is marked inferred.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Albert Camus and their work.
The Academy's biography, used for the Algerian childhood, the Combat years and the 1957 prize.
Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Albert Camus.
The scholarly reference on the absurd, The Rebel and the quarrel with Sartre.
Published analysis and historical context used in preparing the Albert Camus page.
Reference entry on the novels, the journalism and the Algerian war.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Albert Camus page.
Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
Published analysis and historical context used in preparing the Albert Camus page.
Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Albert Camus page.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Albert Camus. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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