Date- 2013-08-06
Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger-- now
one of the most widely read novels of this century-- in 1942.
Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in
a car accident.
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His childhood was poor,
although not unhappy. He studied philosophy at the University of
Algiers, and became a journalist as well as organizing the The tre
de l'equipe, a young avant-garde dramatic group.
His early essays were collected in L'Envers et l'endroit (The Wrong
Side and the Right Side) and Noces (Nuptials). He went to Paris,
where he worked on the newspaper Paris Soir before returning to
Algeria. His play, Caligula, appeared in 1939. His first two
important books, L'Etranger (The Outsider) and the long essay Le
Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), were published when he
returned to Paris.
After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became
one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He
edited and contributed to the underground newspaper Combat, which
he had helped to found. After the war he devoted himself to writing
and established an international reputation with such books as La
Peste (The Plague 1947), Les Justes (The Just 1949) and La Chute
(The Fall; 1956). During the late 1950s Camus renewed his active
interest in the theatre, writing and directing stage adaptations of
William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun and Dostoyevsky's The
Possessed. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
He was killed in a road accident in 1960.
His last novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man), unfinished at the
time of his death, appeared for the first time in 1994. An instant
bestseller, the book received widespread critical acclaim, and has
been translated and published in over thirty countries. Much of
Camus's work is available in Penguin.
Sartre paid tribute to him in his obituary notice- 'Camus could
never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural
domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and
of this century.'
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