Albert Camus

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“”The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

—Albert Camus, 1938

Albert Camus (7 November 1913–4 January 1960) was an Algerian-French author, philosopher, dramatist, world federalist, and political activist. He is often associated with existentialism, but 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. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he received the award in 1957 at the age of 44. He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in a car crash only two years after receiving the award.

Personal life

Camus was born in Algeria (while it was a French colony) and lived there for much of his life. He was a goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger junior team from 1928 to 1930 in his youth, but had to stop after he contracted tuberculosis moving to the French Alps on advice. After college, he moved to France and started writing essays and novels.

Philosophy

Camus, rejecting the label of existentialism, instead propagating the philosophy of absurdism. His philosophy states that the meaning of life is either non-existent or unknowable. As such, the only way to feel fulfilled is to accept the absurdity of the universe, and continue living despite it.

His peculiar brand of existentialist thought put him at opposition with the other famous existentialist thinkerst, and scholars disagree as to whether he was genuinely existentialist or merely a free-choice-based anarchist.

Death

Camus a passenger of Michel Gallimard's died in an automobile accident in a small town called Villeblevin on the 4^th January 1960 when his car hit a tree with Michael dying 5 days later and Camus instantly. How absurd. This made him the youngest dead recipient of the Nobel prize for literature.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Stranger (L'Étranger, sometimes translated as The Outsider) (1942)
• The Plague (La Peste) (1947)
• The Fall (La Chute) (1956)
• A Happy Death (La Mort heureuse) (written 1936-1938, published posthumously 1971)
• The First Man (Le premier homme) (incomplete, published posthumously 1995)

Short stories

• Exile and the Kingdom (L'exil et le royaume) (a collection of long and short stories) (1957)

Non-fiction

• Betwixt and Between (L'envers et l'endroit, also translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side) (Collection, 1937)
• The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942)
• Neither Victim Nor Executioner (Combat) (1946)
• The Rebel (L'Homme révolté) (1951)
• Reflections on the Guillotine (Réfléxions sur la guillotine) (Extended essay, 1957)
• Notebooks 1935-1942 (Carnets, mai 1935 — fevrier 1942) (1962)
• Notebooks 1943-1951 (1965)
• Nuptials (Noces)

Plays

• Caligula (performed 1945, written 1938)
• The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) (1944)
• State of Siege (L'État de siège) (1948)
• The Just Assassins (Les Justes) (1949)
• The Possessed (Les Possédés, adapted from Dostoyevsky's novel by the same name) (1959)

Collections

• Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961) - a collection of essays selected by the author.
• Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970)
• Youthful Writings (1976)
• Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper "Combat", 1944-1947 (1991)
• Camus at "Combat": Writing 1944-1947 (2005)