Birth in Mondovi
He was born on 7 November in Mondovi, in French Algeria; his father died in 1914 of wounds received at the Battle of the Marne.
Absurd and revolt · essay, novel and theatre · 1913–1960
Albert Camus
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Algiers · Paris · Lourmarin
Biography
The thread of a life.
Albert Camus was a French writer born into a poor family in Algeria, a journalist of the Resistance, a novelist, playwright and essayist, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He described the absurd as the clash between the human demand for meaning and a world that stays silent, rejected both suicide and the leap of faith, and then sought in revolt a value that sets limits on violence, against the political murders of his century.
The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus
Gallimard published the novel in June and the essay in October, in occupied Paris.
Editor of Combat
He ran the newspaper of the Combat resistance movement from clandestinity through the Liberation and into the first post-war years.
The Rebel and the break with Sartre
The essay’s critique of revolutionary violence provoked a hostile review in Les Temps modernes and ended his friendship with Sartre.
Nobel Prize in Literature
The Swedish Academy honoured a body of work that illuminates with clear-sighted earnestness the problems of the human conscience in our times.
Death on the road
He was killed on 4 January near Villeblevin in a car driven by Michel Gallimard; the unfinished manuscript of The First Man was found in his briefcase.
Understanding a life in depth
01Algiers, poverty and light
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, in eastern Algeria, the second son of a wine-cellar worker mortally wounded at the Marne in 1914 and of Catherine Sintès, a partly deaf and illiterate woman of Minorcan descent. He grew up in the working-class district of Belcourt in Algiers, where the schoolteacher Louis Germain secured him a scholarship to the lycée and where Jean Grenier taught him philosophy. A first attack of tuberculosis in 1930 ended his days as a goalkeeper and later barred him from the agrégation. He completed a dissertation on Plotinus and Augustine in 1936, belonged to the Communist Party from 1935 to 1937, founded an amateur theatre company and published Betwixt and Between in 1937 and Nuptials in 1938, lyrical essays on the sun and sea of the Mediterranean. As a reporter for Alger républicain he exposed the destitution of Kabylia in 1939.
02The cycle of the absurd and the Resistance
In 1940 Camus moved to Paris as a sub-editor at Paris-Soir, married Francine Faure in Lyon that December and spent 1941 in Oran, putting the finishing touches to what he called the cycle of the absurd: The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and the play Caligula. Both books appeared in 1942; that summer he left to treat his tuberculosis in the Massif Central, where the Allied landings in North Africa in November cut him off from Algeria. He joined the Combat movement, took charge of its clandestine newspaper in 1944 and, after the Liberation, wrote editorials that made him one of the moral voices of the day; on 8 August 1945 he was among the few to condemn the bombing of Hiroshima. A reader for Gallimard from 1943, he had The Misunderstanding staged in 1944 and Caligula in 1945, and in 1947 The Plague, an allegory of occupation and resistance, became his greatest success.
03Revolt, measure and the great quarrel
After the war Camus rejected the label of existentialist and, in the articles Neither Victims nor Executioners of 1946, refused any politics that would justify murder for the sake of the future. The Just, staged in 1949, brought to the stage the Russian terrorists of 1905 who refused to kill children, and The Rebel, published in 1951, traced how revolt against injustice turns into revolutionary terror. Francis Jeanson’s review in Les Temps modernes in 1952, followed by an exchange of letters with Sartre, ended their friendship and isolated Camus on the left. As the Algerian war intensified, he called in Algiers in January 1956 for a civil truce that would spare civilians on both sides; the attempt failed, and he largely withdrew from public debate. That same year The Fall, the confession of a lawyer turned judge-penitent, revealed a darker and more ironic side of his work.
04The Nobel Prize and the unfinished book
In 1957 Camus published the stories of Exile and the Kingdom and Reflections on the Guillotine, a plea against capital punishment, and in October received the Nobel Prize in Literature; he dedicated his Stockholm speeches to his old schoolteacher Louis Germain. At a meeting with students there, pressed about Algeria, he said that if justice meant bombs in the trams of Algiers, where his mother might be riding, he preferred his mother. With the prize money he bought a house in Lourmarin, in Provence, and in 1959 staged his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. On 4 January 1960 he was killed when the car driven by his friend Michel Gallimard struck a tree near Villeblevin. The manuscript found with him, The First Man, an autobiographical novel of an Algerian childhood, was published by his daughter Catherine in 1994.
His work remains among the most widely read in modern French literature and is central to debates on the absurd, political violence, capital punishment and the ethics of means and ends. His quarrel with Sartre still frames discussion of intellectuals and communism, while his stance during the Algerian war and the nameless Arab of The Stranger are reread by postcolonial critics and by novelists such as Kamel Daoud.
Sources & reference pointsContinue
Linked thinkers
- Read and answered
- In dialogue
- Kindred questions