Camus, Albert, << ka MOO, al BEHR >> (1913-1960), was a French journalist, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and playwright who was associated with the Existentialist movement (see Existentialism). He won the 1957 Nobel Prize in literature. Camus wrote moving essays about his native northern Africa and set much of his fiction there. But his writing transcends its setting because it deals with moral problems of universal importance.
Camus was concerned with the freedom and responsibility of the individual, the alienation of the individual from society, and the difficulty of facing life without the comfort of believing in God or in absolute moral standards. These themes appear in his novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1957); and in his play Caligula (1945).
Camus wrote two widely discussed philosophical essays. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), he said “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” He argued that people hang on to life even though life has no meaning or purpose to justify it and is thus “absurd.” The Rebel (1951) is a critical examination of the forms of human rebellion.
Camus was born on Nov. 7, 1913, in Algeria and went to France for the first time in 1939. In 1942, he joined the French resistance against the Nazis and edited its underground newspaper, Combat. He died on Jan. 4, 1960.
