Albert Camus
1913–1960 9 entries
Biography
Albert Camus was a French writer and philosopher, one of the great voices of the twentieth century. He was born in 1913 in Mondovi, in French Algeria; his father was killed in the First World War the following year, and he grew up in poverty in Algiers with his mother, who was partly deaf and could not read. A scholarship took him to secondary school and university, where he studied philosophy and played in goal until tuberculosis ended his football.
During the Second World War he edited Combat, a newspaper of the French Resistance, and in 1942 he published the novel The Stranger and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which made him the writer of the absurd, of a world that gives no answer to our need for meaning. In The Plague and The Rebel he turned to revolt and solidarity, a road that led to his break with Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1957, at forty-four, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in a car accident in January 1960, with the unfinished manuscript of his novel The First Man in his bag.
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