Albert Camus

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize at forty-four and died in a car crash three years later. Born in French Algeria in 1913, he was the son of a farm labourer killed at the Marne in 1914 and an illiterate, partly deaf cleaning woman of Spanish descent. He grew up in a two-room flat in a poor quarter of Algiers, and a schoolteacher secured him a scholarship. He was a keen goalkeeper until tuberculosis at seventeen ended it and recurred throughout his life. He worked as a journalist in Algiers, reporting on the poverty of the Kabyle region in a series that got the paper banned, and moved to France, joining the Resistance and editing the underground paper Combat. His subject is the absurd — the gap between the human demand that life mean something and a universe that supplies no answer. The Myth of Sisyphus argues that the only serious philosophical question is suicide, and answers it: the man rolling the stone forever must be imagined happy, because the struggle itself fills a life. The Outsider of 1942 opens with a man who cannot pretend to grieve at his mother's funeral and is condemned as much for that as for killing an Arab on a beach. The Plague of 1947 has a doctor working through an epidemic without hope of victory. He broke publicly with Sartre in 1952 over the Soviet camps, and was attacked from the left for it and for refusing to endorse the FLN's bombings in Algeria. He died in January 1960 with an unused train ticket in his pocket.

• Lived: 1913 CE – 1960 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: writer, philosopher