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Albert Camus
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Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time; in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright ([E].g., Caligula, 1944). He ... adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun.
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Albert Camus is one of the best-known twentieth-century French authors. Born and raised in North Africa, after the beginning of World War II he moved to Paris where he intended to pursue his career as a journalist and aspiring writer. In 1942, with the publication of L'Etranger (translated in England as The Outsider and in the United States as The Stranger, 1946) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (translated as The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), he found instant fame and was widely and wrongly considered a major representative of the emerging existentialist movement. As an influential editorialist of Combat, France's leading daily in the immediate post-World War II period, he became a highly public figure and was perceived for a while, in international opinion, as the conscience of his nation. His instinctual rejection of ideologies and the carefully nurtured ambiguity which informs all his works and, in the eyes of several critics, some of his positions are some of the reasons for the increasingly ambivalent reception his work has received in France.
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Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus was exploring what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."
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The writings of Albert Camus have had a decisive influence on the political convictions of many young Frenchmen. Yet he often sounds like a Christian moralist. In fact there is no better way of moving toward the center of his political convictions than by recognizing their theological dimension.
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Novelist and essayist Albert Camus is remembered for his existentialist works such as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Rebel. He was born in Algeria and moved to France prior to World War II. He was a member of the Resistance during the War. Although once close to Jean Paul Sartre, Camus broke off the relationship over the issue of Stalinist policies of the early 1950s. Camus received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. He died in a car accident in 1960.
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Albert Camus characterizes his justification of the absurd through the experiences of a protagonist who simply does not conform to the system. His inherent honesty disturbs the status quo; Meursault’s inability to lie cannot seamlessly integrate him within society and in turn threatens the simple fabrics of human mannerisms expected of a structurally ordered society. Consequently, the punishment for his crime is not decided on the basis of murder, but rather for the startling indifference towards his mother’s recent demise. Even after a conflicting spiritual discussion with a pastor inciting Meursault to consider a possible path towards redemption, the latter still refuses to take upon salvation and symbolizes his ultimatum by embracing the “gentle indifference of the world;” an act which only furthers his solidarity with a society incapable of realizing his seemingly inhumane and misanthropic behavior.
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Albert Camus