Long Fiction:
La Mort heureuse, wr. 1936-1938, pb. 1971 (A Happy Death, 1972)
L’Étranger, 1942 (The Stranger, 1946)
La Peste, 1947 (The Plague, 1948)
La Chute, 1956 (The Fall, 1957)
Le Premier Homme, 1994 (The First Man, 1995)
Short Fiction:
L’Exil et le royaume, 1957 (Exile and the Kingdom, 1958)
Drama:
Caligula, wr. 1938-1939, pb. 1944 (English translation, 1948)
Le Malentendu, pr., pb. 1944 (The Misunderstanding, 1948)
L’État de siège, pr., pb. 1948 (State of Siege, 1958)
Les Justes, pr. 1949 (The Just Assassins, 1958)
Caligula and Three Other Plays, pb. 1958
Les Possédés, pr., pb. 1959 (adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevski’s novel; The Possessed, 1960)
Nonfiction:
L’Envers et l’endroit, 1937 (“The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” 1968)
Noces, 1938 (“Nuptials,” 1968)
Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942 (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955)
L’Homme révolté, 1951 (The Rebel, 1953)
L’Été, 1954 (“Summer,” 1968)
Carnets: Mai 1935-février 1942, 1962 (Notebooks: 1935-1942, 1963)
Carnets: Janvier 1942-mars 1951, 1964 (Notebooks: 1942-1951, 1965)
Lyrical and Critical Essays, 1968 (includes “The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” “Nuptials,” and “Summer”)
Correspondance: 1939-1947, 2000
Albert Camus (kah-mew), the Algerian-born French writer of novels, short stories, dramas, essays, and journalism, was one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. He recoiled from the dogmas of totalitarianism and organized religion that dictated human behavior, from existentialism’s despairing emphasis on anxiety and forlornness, and from nihilism’s insistence that human behavior did not matter. Instead, he achieved a literature of exigent moral questioning that clung to a Hellenistic faith in individualism, seeking a formula through which a person could live in dignity and decency within a godless, irrational, “absurd” universe.
Albert Camus
Camus grew up in poverty. After his father died of war wounds ten months after the boy’s birth, his illiterate mother was forced to earn a meager living as a cleaning woman. Encouraged by a remarkable teacher in grade school, he won a scholarship to an Algerian lycée, where he studied philosophy and read widely but also played soccer and swam. In 1930, he had the first of what were to be many attacks of tuberculosis. In 1934, he entered a disastrous one-year marriage. He also joined the Communist Party, only to leave it three years later.
During the mid-to late 1930’s, Camus began the notebooks that he kept from then on; he also wrote journalistic essays, founded a theatrical company, and wrote his first novel, A Happy Death (though it was not published until 1971), which can be considered a preliminary study for The Stranger. In 1939, he was rejected for military service because of his tuberculosis. Camus married the Algerian-born Francine Faure in December, 1940. Possessed by a Don Juanesque need to conquer women, however, he had many affairs, as well as a liaison with the actress Maria Casarès that lasted intermittently from 1944 until his death in 1960.
In 1942, Camus left Algeria for Paris, working there as a journalist and publisher’s editor; in 1943, he became editor of the resistance newspaper Combat. That same year, Camus also published what were to prove his two most influential texts: The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. Together with his play Caligula, these works develop, narrate, and dramatize his core concept of absurdism. For Camus, the absurd is the void between the human need for a universe that is coherent, lucid, and rational and the reality of the universe as largely incoherent, meaningless, and irrational.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that human beings should renounce any nostalgia for a divinely ordered world and should instead adopt an ethic of heroic hedonism, of passionately lucid living. Accordingly, the protagonist of The Stranger, Meursault, recognizes the world’s conventions and codes as arbitrary and senseless. He comes to realize that he has loved life intensely for its physical pleasures and therefore greets his death by execution exultantly. In Caligula, the Roman emperor seeks to educate his subjects for an absurd world by torturing and killing a large number of them, finally inciting the patricians to rebel against his monstrous rule and murder him.
The next cycle of Camus’s works centering on the absurd is best represented by his long essay The Rebel and his novel The Plague. In The Rebel, Camus rejects both the metaphysical attempts to abolish an absurd universe incarnate in religion and the political attempts to cancel absurdism exemplified by totalitarian political regimes. In The Plague, he presents a variety of human responses to the plague’s toll of undeserved suffering and unjust death.
Camus’s career in the 1950’s was characterized by extreme tensions. His friendship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ended in a sharp public dispute because Sartre condoned Stalinism, which Camus vehemently condemned. When Algeria’s Muslims demanded that the land of his birth become a nation independent of France, Camus found himself unable either to support or to oppose their uprising. His notebooks show that his mood during this decade was frequently depressed. He developed a writer’s block that lasted for years and was only partially thawed by the composition of what was to be his last complete novel, The Fall.
The Fall is an ironic, deceptive book in which the first-person narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, tells his life story to an unnamed, silent auditor who may well be humankind. Overcome by guilt from not aiding a suicidal woman, Clamence seeks to expiate his failure by attempting to baptize his listeners into a tyranny of universal sin and shame. For Camus, such a judgment amounts to a false clemency; he regarded guilt as accidental, relative, and individual, whereas personal freedom and dignity were a human being’s most cherished values.
In 1957, Camus, then forty-four, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; he was its second-youngest recipient. He thereupon began work on what he announced would be his first long novel, to be entitled Le premier homme (the first man). He had written approximately one hundred pages of the work when on January 4, 1960, the sports car in which he was riding as a passenger smashed into two trees, killing him instantly. After his death, Camus’s reputation fluctuated, with the Anglo-American world continuing to admire his work and the younger generation of French readers almost ignoring it. His stature as a courageously committed humanistic writer, impatient with mysticism and skeptical regarding all ideological claims, however, should survive the ebb and flow of popular sentiment.