Albert Camus believed that confronting the absurd world and rebelling against it was the path to preserving human dignity. His works and ideas contain profound reflections on life and freedom.
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, then a French colony, as the second son of a poor family. His father, a miner, was killed in World War I. He lived with his mother, who never attended school, his stubborn grandmother, and his uncle, who was lame in one leg. As he later recalled, he learned freedom not from Marx (though he briefly joined the French Communist Party during university) but from poverty. His youth was wretched.
His mother carried ammunition at a munitions factory and worked as a housekeeper, yet Camus struggled to advance beyond the compulsory elementary school education of the time. However, with the help of a teacher who recognized his talent, he secured a scholarship. Though the honor of being a scholarship student followed him throughout, it was a gloomy period for him.
He suffered from lung disease, but his introverted nature kept him from showing it outwardly, leading him to be labeled a rebellious and ill-mannered student. Then, during high school, influenced by his mentor Jean Grenier (a French novelist and philosopher, author of the essay collection Islands, which Camus highly praised), he devoted himself to literature.
He later enrolled in the philosophy department at the University of Algiers, becoming passionate about football, amateur theater, and liberation movements for oppressed social groups. He joined the Communist Party in 1934 but left the party the following year. In 1936, he resumed his interrupted studies and worked as a newspaper reporter in Algeria. However, he angered the authorities over racial issues and was transferred to Paris. Around this time, he published his first work, the poetic essay Nuptials, which received favorable reviews in the extremely limited space available. This work marked the beginning of his philosophical questioning.
Camus argued that “when one becomes conscious of one’s own sense of existence, one can escape the anxiety arising from the conflict between the physical demands of life and the spiritual demands that aspire to the absolute. Human dignity lies in refusing all compromise, in confronting the absurdity of human fate head-on, and in denying God, eternity, hope, and the like.” When his philosophical critique The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942) and The Stranger were published the following year, people began calling him an existentialist philosopher. In 1944, his absurdist play The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) was staged, drawing significant attention.
He then devoted himself to the anti-Nazi resistance movement, serving as editor-in-chief of the underground newspaper *Combat*. After Paris was liberated following Germany’s defeat, he participated in the surrealist magazine *Minotaure*, published under André Breton’s leadership. He actively engaged in creative work, interacting with artists across various genres and fields.
In 1947, his work The Plague, considered the culmination of Camus’s philosophy, was published by Gallimard and won the Critics’ Prize that year, establishing his foundation as a writer. Subsequently, he published the plays The State of Siege (1948) and The Just (1949), the political commentary collection Current Affairs (Actuelles) 1 (1950), and the essay collection The Rebel (L’Homme révolté) (1951), which describes active resistance against the absurd. This critique is read as an extension of The Myth of Sisyphus.
Around 1952, differences in views on Marx’s historical materialism, Stalin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolutionary theory severed the relationship with Sartre that had persisted since 1943.
Following the publication of *Critique and Society 1* in 1950, *Critique and Society 2* in 1953, and the essay collection *Summer* in 1954, he published *The Fall* in 1956 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, 1957. Though *Critique of Current Affairs 3* was published in 1958, it received little attention. In 1959, he began writing the novel *The First Man* while touring with an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s *Demons*. He died in a car accident in 1960 while returning from vacation, leaving the work unfinished; it was published posthumously.
Camus’s masterpiece The Stranger, though seemingly an ordinary tale, depicts the existential emptiness felt by an individual confronted with the world’s irrationality and absurdity, rendered in Camus’s unique style. Towards the end, one glimpses a rich facet of human life and experiences a surprisingly exquisite taste.
