Albert Camus

Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher and writer. Camus wrote novels and plays. Camus was born in Algeria, a country in North Africa. He had French parents. Camus was an existentialist philosopher. Existentialism is a philosophy that is very different from other ways of thinking. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.

His life

Early years 
Albert Camus was born in Algeria to a poor working-class family.  His mother was Spanish and his father was French. His father died in battle and he was left to live with his grandmother. When he was 17 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which was very impactful on him at that point in his life. It limited him greatly in his athletics as well as in his career opportunities, due to the fact that tuberculosis is quite contagious. For this reason he claimed that his disease “set him free” because he would have done something else with his life had he seen the opportunity.  He went to the University of Algiers, where he graduated with a degree in 1935. In the 1930s, Camus became interested in politics. In 1935, Camus joined the French Communist Party, a political group. In the late 1930s, Camus was a writer for the socialist newspaper, the Alger-Republicain.

1940s 
In 1941, Camus wrote his first novel, which was called The Stranger. During World War II, Camus joined the French Resistance to fight against the Nazi army. After World War II, Camus became friends with another writer named Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus and Sartre often talked about philosophy and politics in small restaurants called cafés.

1950s 
Camus wrote books about philosophy (ways of thinking) which said that life was "absurd" (makes no sense, or has no meaning). In the 1950s Camus tried to improve human rights. In 1960, Camus died in a car crash. He had two children, Catherine and Jean.

Some of his novels (stories) 
 The Stranger (l'étranger) (sometimes called The Outsider) (1942)
 The Plague (la peste) (1947)
 The Fall (la chute) (1956)

Some of his books about philosophy 
 Betwixt and Between (1937)
 The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
 The Rebel  (1951)

Plays 
 Caligula (1938)
 The Misunderstanding (1944)
 State of Siege (1948)
 The Just Assassins  (1949)
 The Possessed (1959)

Correspondence 
 Albert Camus, Maria Casarès. Correspondance inédite (1944-1959). Édition de Béatrice Vaillant. Avant-propos de Catherine Camus. Collection Blanche, Gallimard. Parution : 09-11-2017.

Books about Camus 
 Camus (1959) by the writer Germaine Brée
 Albert Camus, A Study of His Work (1957) by the writer Usamah Siddiqui
 Heiner Wittmann: Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom. Hrsg. v. Dirk Hoeges. Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs, Band 13, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2009

Related pages
 Existentialism

References

Other websites 

 Nobel Prize in Literature (1957) 
 Fonds Albert Camus - Cité du livre d'Aix en Provence
 Société des Études Camusiennes 
 The Albert Camus Society

1913 births
1960 deaths
20th-century French philosophers
Accidental deaths in France
French atheists
French Nobel Prize winners
French novelists
French playwrights
Marxism
Road accident deaths