Albert Camus (French pronunciation: [albɛʁ kamy]) (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was an Algerian-born French author, philosopher, and journalist who won the Nobel prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label. On the other hand, as he wrote in his essay The Rebel, his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism. On the subject of his belief or not in God, he writes in the third volume of his notebooks: "I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
Easton Press Albert Camus books
The Plague
The Stranger - The Collector's Library of Famous Editions - 1993
The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays
Franklin Library Albert Camus books
Exile and the Kingdom - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1980
(This page contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.)
In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons in the Revolutionary Union Movement, according to the book Albert Camus, une vie by Olivier Todd, a group opposed to the atheist and communistic tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award, in 1957. He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident only three years after receiving the award.
Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…"
Author Albert Camus
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria to a French-Algerian (pied-noir) settler family. His mother was of Spanish extraction and was half-deaf. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during the First World War, while serving as a member of the Zouave infantry regiment. Camus lived in poor conditions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. In 1923, he was accepted into the lycée and eventually to the University of Algiers. However, he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, which put an end to his football activities (he had been a goalkeeper for the university team) and forced him to make his studies a part-time pursuit. He took odd jobs including private tutor, car parts clerk and work for the Meteorological Institute. He completed his licence de philosophie (BA) in 1935; in May 1936, he successfully presented his thesis on Plotinus, Néo-Platonisme et Pensée Chrétienne, for his diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an M.A. by thesis).
Camus joined the French Communist Party in the Spring of 1935 seeing it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria", he did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, but did write that "[w]e might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities".[2] In 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party (PCA) was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian People's Party (Le Parti du Peuple Algérien), which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades. As a result, he was denounced as a Trotskyite and expelled from the party in 1937. Camus went on to be associated with the French anarchist movement. The anarchist Andre Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Etudiants Anarchistes (Anarchist Student Circle) as a sympathiser who was familiar with anarchist thought. Camus went on to write for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Proletarienne and Solidaridad Obrera (the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT). Camus also stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. He again stood with the anarchists in 1956, first with the workers’ uprising in Poznan, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution.
In 1934, he married Simone Hie, a morphine addict, but the marriage ended as a consequence of infidelities on both sides. In 1935, he founded Théâtre du Travail — "Worker's Theatre" — (renamed Théâtre de l'Equipe ("Team's Theatre") in 1937), which survived until 1939. From 1937 to 1939 he wrote for a socialist paper, Alger-Républicain, and his work included an account of the peasants who lived in Kabylie in poor conditions, which apparently cost him his job. From 1939 to 1940, he briefly wrote for a similar paper, Soir-Republicain. He was rejected by the French army because of his tuberculosis.
In 1940, Camus married Francine Faure, a pianist and mathematician. Although he loved Francine, he had argued passionately against the institution of marriage, dismissing it as unnatural. Even after Francine gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean, on 5 September 1945, he continued to joke wearily to friends that he was not cut out for marriage. Camus conducted numerous affairs, particularly an irregular and eventually public affair with the Spanish-born actress Maria Casares. In the same year Camus began to work for Paris-Soir magazine. In the first stage of World War II, the so-called Phony War stage, Camus was a pacifist. However, he was in Paris to witness how the Wehrmacht took over. On 15 December 1941, Camus witnessed the execution of Gabriel Péri, an event that Camus later said crystallized his revolt against the Germans. Afterwards he moved to Bordeaux alongside the rest of the staff of Paris-Soir. In the same year he finished his first books, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He returned briefly to Oran, Algeria in 1942.
Literary career
During the war Camus joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. This group worked against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre "Beauchard". Camus became the paper's editor in 1943, and when the Allies liberated Paris, Camus reported on the last of the fighting. He was, however, one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition to the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima soon after the event on 8 August 1945. He eventually resigned from Combat in 1947, when it became a commercial paper. It was then that Camus became acquainted with Jean-Paul Sartre.
After the war, Camus began frequenting the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris with Sartre and others. Camus also toured the United States to lecture about French thinking. Although he leaned left politically, his strong criticisms of Communist doctrine did not win him any friends in the Communist parties and eventually also alienated Sartre.
In 1949 his tuberculosis returned and he lived in seclusion for two years. In 1951 he published The Rebel, a philosophical analysis of rebellion and revolution which made clear his rejection of communism. The book upset many of his colleagues and contemporaries in France and led to the final split with Sartre. The dour reception depressed him and he began instead to translate plays.
Camus' first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he explained in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as The Stranger and The Plague. Despite the split from his "study partner," Sartre, some still argue that Camus falls into the existentialist camp. However, he rejected that label himself in his essay Enigma and elsewhere (see: The Lyrical and Critical Essays of Albert Camus). The current confusion may still arise as many recent applications of existentialism have much in common with many of Camus' practical ideas. However, the personal understanding he had of the world (e.g. "a benign indifference", in The Stranger), and every vision he had for its progress (i.e. vanquishing the "adolescent furies" of history and society, in The Rebel) undoubtedly sets him apart.
In the 1950s Camus devoted his efforts to human rights. In 1952 he resigned from his work for UNESCO when the UN accepted Spain as a member under the leadership of General Franco. In 1953 he criticized Soviet methods to crush a workers' strike in East Berlin. In 1956 he protested against similar methods in Poland (protests in Poznań) and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution in October.
He maintained his pacifism and resistance to capital punishment anywhere in the world. One of his most significant contributions to the movement against capital punishment was an essay collaboration with Arthur Koestler, the writer, intellectual and founder of the League Against Capital Punishment.
When the Algerian War began in 1954 it presented a moral dilemma for Camus. He identified with pied-noirs, and defended the French government on the grounds that the revolt in Algeria was really an integral part of the 'new Arab imperialism' led by Egypt and an 'anti-Western' offensive orchestrated by Russia to 'encircle Europe' and 'isolate the United States'. Although favouring greater Algerian autonomy or even federation, though not full-scale independence, he believed that the pied-noirs and Arabs could co-exist. During the war he advocated civil truce that would spare the civilians, which was rejected by both sides who regarded it as foolish. Behind the scenes, he began to work for imprisoned Algerians who faced the death penalty.
From 1955 to 1956 Camus wrote for L'Express. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.", officially not for his novel The Fall, published the previous year, but for his writings against capital punishment in the essay Réflexions sur la Guillotine. When he spoke to students at the University of Stockholm, he defended his apparent inactivity in the Algerian question and stated that he was worried about what might happen to his mother, who still lived in Algeria. This led to further ostracism by French left-wing intellectuals.
The Revolutionary Union Movement and the European Union
In 1949 Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons in the Revolutionary Union Movement. With George Orwell, he opposed totalitarian regimes in the East and the West.
As he wrote in L'Homme révolté (in the chapter about "The Thought on Midday") he was a follower of the ancient Greek 'Solar Tradition' (la pensée solaire). So, not only he was the leader of the French resistance movement "Combat" but he also set up in 1947-8 the Revolutionary Union Movement (Groupes de liaison internationale - GLI) which was formed in 1949 and can be described as a trade union movement in the context of revolutionary syndicalism (Syndicalisme révolutionnaire). For more, see the book : Alfred Rosmer et le mouvement révolutionnaire internationale by Christian Gras).
His colleagues were Nicolas Lazarévitch, Louis Mercier, Roger Lapeyre, Paul Chauvet, Auguste Largentier, Jean de Boë (see the article: "Nicolas Lazarévitch, Itinéraire d'un syndicaliste révolutionnaire" by Sylvain Boulouque in the review Communisme, n° 61, 2000). His main aim was to express the positive side of Surrealism and Existentialism, rejecting the negativity and the nihilism of André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre.
In 1944 Camus founded the "French Committee for the European Federation" (Comité Français pour la Féderation Européene -CFFE) declaring that Europe "can only evolve along the path of economic progress, democracy and peace if the nation states become a federation".
From 1943, Albert Camus had correspondence with Altiero Spinelli who founded the European Federalist Movement in Milan—see Ventotene Manifesto and the book "Unire l'Europa, superare gli stati", Altiero Spinelli nel Partito d'Azione del Nord Italia e in Francia dal 1944 al 1945-annexed a letter by Altiero Spinelli to Albert Camus.
In 22-25 March 1945, the first conference of the European Federalist Movement was organised in Paris with the participation of Albert Camus, George Orwell, Emmanuel Mounier, Lewis Mumford, André Philip, Daniel Mayer, François Bondy and Altiero Spinelli. This specific branch of the European Federalist Movement disintegrated in 1957 after the domination of Winston Churchill's ideas about the European integration.
Albert Camus's death
Camus died on 4 January 1960 in an automobile accident near Sens, in a place named "Le Grand Fossard" in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. It is possible that he had planned to travel by train, but decided to go by car instead.
The driver of the Facel Vega car, Michel Gallimard — his publisher and close friend — also perished in the accident. Camus was interred in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Lourmarin, Vaucluse, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France.
He was survived by his twin children, Catherine and Jean, who hold the copyrights to his work.
After his death, two of Camus' works were published posthumously. The first, entitled A Happy Death published in 1970, featured a character named Meursault, as in The Stranger, but there is some debate as to the relationship between the two stories. The second posthumous publication was an unfinished novel, The First Man, that Camus was writing before he died. The novel was an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria and was published in 1995.
The Plague
The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947.
It
tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague
sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown
until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel
presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's
distinctive absurdist point of view.
The book tells a gripping
tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the
ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a
masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and
a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times.
In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series
of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent
reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to
almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.
The
Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection
to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual
characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to
Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially
have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as
stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.
The Stranger
Published
in 1942 by French author Albert Camus, The Stranger has long been
considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it
as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story
of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a
sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness
of man faced with the absurd."
The Myth of Sisyphus
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Inspired by the myth of a man condemned to ceaselessly push a rock up a mountain and watch it roll back to the valley below, The Myth of Sisyphus transformed twentieth-century philosophy with its impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning.
Exile and the Kingdom
Titles include:
The Adulterous Woman (La Femme adultère)
The Renegade or a Confused Spirit (Le Renégat ou un esprit confus)
The Silent Men (Les Muets)
The Guest (L'Hôte)
Jonas or the Artist at Work (Jonas ou l’artiste au travail)
The Growing Stone (La Pierre qui pousse)
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man’s perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. They display Camus at the height of his powers.
The Fall
The
Fall (La Chute) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1956. It is
one of Camus's later works and is considered a philosophical novel that
explores themes of guilt, morality, and the human condition. The novel
is narrated by its central character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former
Parisian lawyer who recounts his life and experiences to an unnamed
interlocutor in a seedy bar in Amsterdam. The narrative unfolds as a
monologue, with Clamence serving as both the narrator and the
protagonist. Clamence, once a successful and morally self-assured
lawyer, undergoes a profound transformation. The novel is structured as a
series of confessions, as Clamence reveals the darker aspects of his
past and his own moral failings.
The title, The Fall, carries
multiple layers of meaning. On one level, it refers to Clamence's
literal fall into the River Seine, an event that becomes a metaphor for
his moral descent. However, the title also alludes to the broader human
condition, suggesting a fall from a state of innocence or moral
certainty. The novel addresses existential themes, examining the nature
of guilt and the consequences of living in a world without inherent
meaning. Clamence grapples with his own hypocrisy, acknowledging the
disparity between his professed moral values and his actions. The
narrative is infused with a sense of isolation and the idea that
individuals are ultimately alone in facing the consequences of their
choices. Camus's exploration of guilt and moral responsibility in The
Fall reflects his broader philosophical concerns, particularly his
engagement with existentialism and the absurd. The novel is often seen
as a continuation of the themes present in Camus's earlier works, such
as The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus.
The Fall is celebrated
for its complex narrative structure, rich symbolism, and profound
philosophical reflections. It remains a significant work in existential
literature and is studied for its exploration of the complexities of
human morality and the consequences of moral indifference. The novel
contributes to Albert Camus's legacy as a writer who grappled with the
fundamental questions of existence and morality in the face of an
indifferent universe.
In 1957, Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognizing his significant literary contributions and moral engagement. However, he distanced himself from political ideologies, including communism and existentialism, leading to tensions with other intellectuals of his time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre.
Source and additional information: Albert Camus