Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a Franco-Algerian novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, journalist, and philosopher who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, when he was 44 years old. He was the second-youngest to win the Nobel for a life-body of work, the first being Rudyard Kipling in 1907 (Kipling was 41 at the announcement). Camus and Kipling make an interesting coincidental pair, since both of their careers were engagements with colonialism, its consequences tragic or strengthening or both. Camus during his lifetime and certainly after his death was hunted by categorical thinkers to capture, cage, and display him as identified as the representative of this or that -ism. He always eludes them. He was an artist, a political man, a newsman, and a wonderfully complex human being.
I will gradually add associated writers, sometimes friends of his (Beauvoir), sometimes later writers who intertwine a work with Camus’s legacy (Daoud). His too-short life, ended by a car wreck, was in the midst of a dramatic time. I don’t think he would want to be isolated from it or his fellow travelers.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays
In the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Albert Camus said that a writer “cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.” And in these twenty-three political essays, he demonstrates his commitment to history’s victims, from the fallen maquis of the French Resistance to the casualties of the Cold War.
Resistance, Rebellion and Death displays Camus’ rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century: The Stranger, The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus.