Biography of Albert Camus (1913-1960)

A French Algerian, born in Mondovi the outskirts of Algiers and raised in one of its poorer neighborhoods. He was the son of Lucien Auguste Camus and Catherine Sintes. Albert Camus came to consciousness on the margins of Western civilization.

His mother was an illiterate charwoman, and father an itinerant agricultural laborer, who was killed in World War I in the battle of Marne.

In 1923, Camus won a scholarship to Lycee in Algiers, where he studied from 1924 to 1932.

Albert Camus 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.

Albert Camus joined the Resistance late. But he quickly made an exceptional contribution both as an activist and as an editor of Combat.

After the war he gave up journalism and concentrated in literary and philosophical work.

He adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. His love for the theatre may be traced back to his membership in L'Equipe, an Algerian theatre group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds Camus's notion of the absurd and of its acceptance with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction".

Other well-known works of Camus are La Chute (The Fall), 1956, and L'Exile et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He was a stylist of great purity and intense concentration and rationality.

Albert Camus idea of the absurd is a significant contribution to philosophy , which he explained in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as The Stranger and The Plaque.

Albert Camus received his Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. He became the first Africa-born writer to receive the award.

He died in car accident near Sens, France, on January 4, 1960.
Biography of Albert Camus