Albert Camus

Camus was born in French Algeria to a poor family of French settlers; his father, a vineyard labourer, was killed at the Marne when he was one, and his mother, a nearly illiterate, half-deaf cleaning woman of Spanish descent, raised him in his grandmother's flat in a poor quarter of Algiers. A primary teacher, Louis Germain, spotted his gifts and won him a scholarship; it was Germain to whom he wrote his letter of thanks after the Nobel Prize. At seventeen he contracted tuberculosis, which threatened him all his life and made him acutely alive to the brevity of life and the pleasures of the body.

He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, writing his thesis on Plotinus and Augustine, and illness kept him from the agrégation. He ran a theatre company, worked as a journalist, joined the Communist party in 1935 and left two years later, moved to Paris in 1940, and in 1942 published the novel The Stranger and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which made him famous at once. During the war he edited the underground paper Combat, writing its editorials calling for resistance, and after the liberation he was the most admired young writer in France.

The Myth of Sisyphus opens with the claim that the one truly serious philosophical problem is suicide. The absurd is the confrontation between the human hunger for meaning and the silence of the world; it lies neither in us nor in the world but in their relation. There are two ways to escape it: physical suicide and 'philosophical suicide', the leap into God or a system. The genuine answer is to live within the absurd, lucidly, in revolt, freedom and passion, like Sisyphus condemned to roll his rock forever, who on the way down knows his fate and scorns it.

The Plague (1947) extended revolt from the individual to the collective: in the face of disaster, one does one's job. The Rebel (1951) surveyed the history of revolt from Sade to Stalin, arguing that revolt turned into absolute revolution breeds new slavery, and that true revolt keeps measure: 'I rebel, therefore we are'. The book cost him Sartre and the left, and in the Algerian war his refusal to endorse either side left him attacked from both. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature at forty-four, one of the youngest laureates. In January 1960, riding with his publisher from Provence to Paris, the car struck a tree and he died instantly, an unused train ticket in his pocket.