Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French Algerian novelist, dramatist, and journalist who in 1957 became, at age 44, the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for illuminating "the problems of the human conscience in our times." His novels The Stranger and The Plague are read in dozens of languages.

He was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, French Algeria, the son of a farm laborer killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914 and an illiterate Spanish-Algerian mother of partial deafness. He was raised in poverty in the Belcourt district of Algiers, attended the lycée on scholarship, and earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers in 1936.

The 1942 publication of the novel L'Étranger and the philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe made him, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, a defining voice of postwar French letters. He edited the Resistance newspaper Combat from 1943 to 1947, and his 1947 novel La Peste became a standard text of European humanism.

His 1951 essay L'Homme révolté precipitated a public break with Sartre over communism and the use of political violence. Later works include the novel La Chute (1956) and the story collection L'Exil et le royaume (1957). He was killed in a car crash near Sens on January 4, 1960, at age 46; the unfinished autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme appeared posthumously in 1994.

The given name Albert is of Germanic origin, from adal ("noble") and beraht ("bright"), meaning "noble and bright." It is a masculine name, and he bore it.