PERSON
Albert Camus
The French-Algerian novelist and philosopher who named the absurd—the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and the universe’s unreasonable silence—and who insisted that the only honest response to that confrontation is not resolution but revolt: the lucid, ongoing refusal to stop living and building in full sight of the futility.
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, French Algeria, in 1913, grew up in poverty in Algiers, wrote his first major works during the German occupation of France, and was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, the year after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. His philosophy emerged from a body of experience—colonial poverty, wartime resistance, bodily illness, Mediterranean light—that shaped it into something European existentialism, for all its rigor, tended to miss: a philosophy that insists on the body, on the noon, on the specific texture of existence as the ground of all honest thought. The three works that define his contribution to the cycle are The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which named the absurd and the doctrine of revolt; The Stranger (1942), whose protagonist Meursault is condemned not for what he did but for refusing to perform the emotions society required; and The