FROM: My favorite writers

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French writer, journalist, and philosopher born in colonial Algeria. His father died in World War I when Camus was an infant, and he grew up in poverty in Algiers with his mother and grandmother. As a teenager, he contracted tuberculosis, an illness that interrupted his education and remained a recurring burden throughout his life. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) During World War II, he joined the French Resistance and became an editor of its underground newspaper, Combat. (Penguin Random House) He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in France in January 1960, aged forty-six. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Three of his most influential books are:

• The Stranger (1942): A novel about an emotionally detached man whose trial for murder exposes society’s expectations about grief, belief, and acceptable behavior.
• The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): A philosophical essay exploring how to embrace life despite the conflict between our desire for meaning and the universe’s silence.
• The Plague (1947): A novel about an epidemic in an Algerian city, examining solidarity, responsibility, and resistance to suffering.