Albert Camus - Biography Highlights
1913 - Born on November 7 in Mondovi, Algeria
1914 - Father drafted into WWI and killed in France
1934 - Marries Simone Hie
1936 - Divorces Simone Hie
1938 - Becomes a journalist
1939 - Volunteers for service in WWII, but is rejected due to illness
1940 - Marries Catherine
1940 - Writes an essay on the state of Muslims in Algeria causing him to lose his job and move to Paris
1941 - Joins the French Resistance
1941 - Meets Jean Paul Sartre
1957 - Wins Nobel Prize for literature
1960 - Dies on January 4 in a car accident on the road to Paris
Bibliography Highlights (ET = English Translation)
1942 - The Stranger (ET 1946)
1942 - The Myth of Sisyphus (ET 1955)
1944 - Caligula (ET 1948)
1944 - Cross Purpose (ET 1948)
1947 - The Plague (ET 1948)
1948 - State of Siege (ET 1958)
1950 - The Just Assassins (ET 1958)
1951 - The Rebel (ET 1954)
1956 - The Fall (ET 1957)
1957 - Exile and the Kingdom (ET 1958)
1971 - A Happy Death (ET 1972)
1973 - Youthful Writings (ET 1976 and 1977)
1994 - The First Man (ET 1995)
Web Sites
http://members.aol.com/KatharenaE/private/Philo/Camus/camus.html
http://www.clark.net/pub/samg/camus.html
http://www.cyber-espace.com/webcamus/
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/camus.htm
http://www.rit.edu/~wjh3421/camus.html
For discussion next class:
Why do you think that Camus has Meursault always referring to his senses when describing an experience?
More Stuff About Camus
Although born in extreme poverty, Camus attended the lycee and university in Algiers, where he developed an abiding interest in sports and the theater. His university career was cut short by a severe attack of tuberculosis, an illness from which he suffered periodically throughout his life. In 1938 he became a journalist with Alger-Republicain, an anti-colonialist newspaper. While working for this daily he wrote detailed reports on the condition of poor Arabs in the Kabyles region.
Such journalistic experience proved invaluable when Camus went to France during World War II. There he worked for the Combat resistance network and undertook the editorship of the Parisian daily Combat, which first appeared clandestinely in 1943. His editorials, both before and after the liberation, showed a deep desire to combine political action with strict adherence to moral principles.
During the war Camus published the main works associated with his doctrine of the absurd -- his view that human life is rendered ultimately meaningless by the fact of death and that the individual cannot make rational sense of his experience. In these works Camus explored contemporary nihilism with considerable sympathy, but his own attitude toward the "absurd" remained ambivalent. In theory, philosophical absurdism logically entails total moral indifference. Camus found, however, that neither his own temperament nor his experiences in occupied France allowed him to be satisfied with such total moral neutrality.
From this point on, Camus was concerned mainly with exploring avenues of rebellion against the absurd as he strove to create something like a humane stoicism. He argued in favor of Mediterranean humanism, advocating nature and moderation rather than historicism and violence. He subsequently became involved in a bitter controversy with Jean Paul Sartre over the issues raised in this essay.
Albert Camus was a forty-six-year-old Nobel laureate in literature when he died in an automobile crash on January 4, 1960. Found amid the debris was an unfinished manuscript, one which remained unpublished until it appeared in France as Le Premier Homme in 1994.