Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian novelist, essayist, and philosopher, born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria, into a poor family. His father was killed in the First World War when Camus was an infant, and he was raised by his mother, a cleaning woman of Spanish descent, in a working-class district of Algiers. A gifted student, he won a scholarship to study philosophy at the University of Algiers, though tuberculosis cut short his early ambitions as a teacher and athlete.

Camus came to prominence during the Second World War, when he edited the French Resistance newspaper Combat and published the works that would define him: the novel The Stranger and the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, both in 1942. These laid out his idea of the absurd, the conflict between humanity's search for meaning and a universe that offers none. He explored the theme further in the novel The Plague and the essay The Rebel, developing a humane philosophy of revolt, solidarity, and moral limits.

Often associated with existentialism, Camus rejected the label and famously broke with Jean-Paul Sartre over politics and philosophy. His insistence on moral clarity, his opposition to both fascism and Soviet communism, and his anguished position on the Algerian War set him apart from many of his contemporaries.

In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the youngest recipients ever, cited for work that illuminated the problems of the human conscience. He died in a car accident in 1960 at the age of forty-six, leaving an unfinished autobiographical novel, The First Man. His spare, luminous prose and his confrontation with meaning in an indifferent world have made him one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century.