Albert Camus

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

The Myth of Sisyphusis one of the most profound philosophical statements written this century. It is a discussion of the central idea of absurdity that Camus was to develop in his novel The Outsider. Here Camus poses the fundamental question: Is life worth living? If existence has ceased to retain significance when confronted with the fragmented reality of the human condition, what then can keep us from suicide? Camus movingly argues for an acceptance...

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence,...

These six stories, written at the height of Camus' artistic powers, all depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, these...

By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the “essential dimensions” of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides,...

The Stranger (French: L'Étranger [l‿e.tʁɑ̃.ʒe]), also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella written by French author Albert Camus. The first of Camus' novels published in his lifetime, the story follows Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who, weeks after his mother's funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and...

In the small coastal city of Oran, Algeria, rats begin rising up from the filth only to die as bloody heaps in the streets. Shortly after, an outbreak of the bubonic plague erupts and envelops the human population. Albert Camus' The Plague is a brilliant and haunting rendering of human perseverance and futility in the face of a relentless terror born of nature.

"Perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, Albert Camus (1913-1960), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is more relevant today than ever before. Personal Writing brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope of his personal preoccupations. Featuring a foreword by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan (author of Looking for the Stranger), this volume...

Ce volume reunit les trente-quatre textes connus des prises de parole publiques d'Albert Camus, s'achevant sur la transcription inedite de son allocution au diner de L'Algerienne, le 13 novembre 1958 a Paris. D'une conference a l'autre, l'ecrivain diagnostique une "crise de l'homme", s'attache a redonner voix et dignite a ceux qui en ont ete prives par un demi-siecle de bruit et de fureur. C'est bien de civilisation qu'il s'agit ici. Pour Albert Camus,...

Cuando Albert Camus ganó en 1957 el Premio Nobel, la citación de la Academia al concederlo dejó constancia de una obra que se destacaba por "el profundo análisis del espíritu y la intensidad artística con que este ha sido interpretado, para mostrar un retrato de la existencia humana". Un ejemplo de su capacidad narrativa unida a un argumento interesante y lleno de episodios, se encuentra en su novela "El extranjero", obra del absurdo, donde...