One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present the two essays and the novel at the heart of Camus’s thought on the absurd and revolt. Betwixt and Between, Nuptials, The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, the plays, Letters to a German Friend, the Combat editorials, the Notebooks and The First Man are not yet indexed; this is a selection, not a complete bibliography.
011942
Subtitled an essay on the absurd and dedicated to Pascal Pia, the book was completed in February 1941 in Oran and published by Gallimard in October 1942, a few months after The Stranger, which it accompanies as a philosophical counterpart. Its study of Kafka, left out of the first edition under the Occupation, was restored as an appendix after the war. Camus presents it as a description of a sensibility of the age, not as a philosophy of the absurd.
021942
Sketched from 1938, completed in Paris in May 1940 and published by Gallimard in June 1942, the novel forms the cycle of the absurd with The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula. Its flat first-person narration in the compound past owes much to American fiction; Sartre devoted a famous essay to it in 1943. Postcolonial critics have questioned the namelessness of the victim, and Kamel Daoud answered it in 2013 with a novel narrated by the dead man’s brother.
031951
Published by Gallimard in October 1951, the essay extends the reasoning of The Myth of Sisyphus: if the absurd forbids suicide, it also forbids legitimized murder. Its critique of Hegel, Marx and the Soviet camps, written at the height of the Cold War, drew Francis Jeanson’s hostile review in Les Temps modernes in May 1952 and then, in August, Sartre’s reply to Camus, which ended their friendship.