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.
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus
One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus—featured here in a stand-alone edition—is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide—the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.