Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, in French Algeria. His father was killed in the first months of the First World War, and he grew up in poverty in the Belcourt district of Algiers with his mother, who could barely hear and could not read. A primary schoolteacher, Louis Germain, secured him a scholarship to the lycée; at the University of Algiers he studied philosophy under Jean Grenier. Tuberculosis, diagnosed at seventeen, ended his hopes as a goalkeeper and an academic career, and gave the sunlit world of his early essays a sharpened sense of mortality.

In Algiers he ran a theatre company and worked as a journalist, reporting on the poverty of Kabylia. In 1942, in occupied Paris, he published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, which together defined ‘the absurd’: the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and a silent universe. During the Resistance he edited the clandestine newspaper Combat. The Plague turned an epidemic in Oran into a fable of collective resistance; The Rebel, arguing against revolutionary violence, led to a bitter break with Sartre; The Fall, a monologue of corrosive self-accusation, was the last novel published in his lifetime. Throughout, he wrote in a restrained, classical French that refused rhetorical excess.

Torn by the Algerian War, he called for a civilian truce and found himself isolated from both camps. He received the Nobel Prize in 1957 at forty-four, among the youngest laureates, and dedicated his Nobel speech to Louis Germain. In January 1960 he was killed in a car accident near Villeblevin. In the wreckage was the manuscript of The First Man, an autobiographical novel published in 1994.