Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, and essayist, born in 1913 near Mondovi in French Algeria and raised in poverty in Algiers. He became one of the twentieth century's most influential moral voices, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 for work that illuminated the problems of the human conscience of his time. He died in a car accident in 1960 at the height of his fame.

Camus is closely associated with existentialism, though he rejected the label, preferring to describe his philosophy as one of the absurd — the tension between humanity's search for meaning and the universe's indifferent silence. His landmark novel «The Stranger» (L'Étranger) introduced Meursault, an emotionally detached narrator whose story became a touchstone of twentieth-century literature. His philosophical essay «The Myth of Sisyphus» laid out his vision of confronting the absurd with lucidity rather than despair, using the image of Sisyphus eternally pushing his boulder as a metaphor for human persistence.

Other major works include «The Plague», «The Fall», and «The Rebel», alongside plays and journalism, notably his editorship of the French Resistance newspaper Combat. Alongside contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he had a famous falling-out over political ideology, Camus championed individual dignity, lucidity, and rebellion against nihilism, leaving a body of work still widely read, translated, and studied today.