Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi (now Dréan), in eastern Algeria, then part of French Algeria. His father, Lucien Camus, an agricultural worker of French-Alsatian descent, was killed in the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, when Camus was less than a year old. His mother, Catherine Sintes, of Spanish descent, was partially deaf. The family lived in poverty in Algiers, where Camus grew up in the working-class Belcourt neighborhood.

Camus showed academic promise and, with the support of a primary school teacher, Jean Grenier, who became a lasting intellectual influence, gained access to secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, completing his thesis in 1936, though tuberculosis, which he contracted in his youth, prevented him from taking the agregation examination.

He worked as a journalist in Algiers, and was a founding member of the Theatre du Travail, for which he wrote, directed, and acted. He joined the French Communist Party briefly in the mid-1930s and later left. He moved to France in 1940 and worked for the Paris-Soir newspaper.

During the German occupation of France, Camus wrote for the underground Resistance publication Combat, eventually becoming its editor. His novel The Stranger (L'Etranger), published in 1942, presented a protagonist who experiences the world with emotional detachment and faces the absurdity of existence. In the same year, his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus examined the concept of the absurd: the conflict between the human desire for meaning and the world's silence in response, arguing that the appropriate response was not despair or evasion but revolt and continued engagement with life.

The Plague (1947), a novel set in an Algerian city during an epidemic, explored collective responses to suffering and death and was widely read as carrying allegorical significance related to the Occupation. The Rebel (1951) examined the ethics and history of political revolt.

Camus received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He died on 4 January 1960 in a road accident near Sens, France, at the age of 46. A manuscript of an unfinished novel, The First Man, was found in the wreckage of the car and was published posthumously in 1994.