Albert Camus Biography

(1913-1960) French writer. With famous works like The Stranger, and The Plague, Albert Camus is recognized as a master of existentialism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957.

Although Camus is best known for his novels, he was also a playwright of some note. His plays include: Caligula (1938) and Cross Purpose (1944).

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria. His father was an agricultural worker, and his mother was an illiterate charwoman.

Albert Camus was killed on January 4, 1960 in a automobile accident while returning to Paris. Two years before his death, he wrote, "I continue to be convinced that my work hasn't even been begun."

Albert Camus married Simone Hié in 1934, but they were divorced two years later.

Albert Camus was a French novelist, essayist and playwright, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times"... Famous works include: The Stranger (1946), The Plague (1948), The Rebel (1954) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1955).

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have happened yesterday."
- "The Stranger"

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."

"Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Walk beside me, and just be my friend."

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd."

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

"There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born."

"For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings."

"To some the sermon simply brought home the fact that they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment. And while a good many people adapted themselves to confinement and carried on their humdrum lives as before, there were others who rebelled and whose one idea now was to break loose from the prison-house."