II.

Life

Camus was born at Mondovi (now Drean), Algeria, to a French father and a Spanish mother. After his father was killed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Camus was raised in poverty by his grandmother and his mother, an illiterate charwoman. Tuberculosis put an end to his studies at the University of Algiers, forcing him also to abandon soccer and to curtail his life in the theater as a playwright, director, and actor. These activities were the passions of his youth. Camus then became interested in politics, was briefly a member of the Communist Party, and in the 1930s began a career in journalism.

Camus’s articles revealing the misery of the Arab population in Algeria led to his dismissal from his newspaper job in Algiers. In 1940 he accompanied his friend and colleague Pascal Pia to Paris to work for the newspaper Paris-Soir. Soon he became involved in the Resistance movement against the occupying German forces, and he began writing for the underground newspaper Combat in 1943 (he served as managing editor from 1944 to 1947). He also published his first major works. Although Camus was associated with the group of writers surrounding French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, he and Sartre always agreed that Camus did not belong to the philosophical movement known as existentialism, of which Sartre was a major proponent. His attack on Stalinist Communism in L’homme révolté (1951; translated as The Rebel, 1957) ended his friendship with Sartre, who at that time still supported Stalin, and alienated Camus from the French political left. In 1957 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Deeply troubled during his last years by the Algerian war for independence (1954-1962), he immersed himself in the theater and in work on an autobiographical novel (Le premier homme, 1994; The First Man, 1995). He was about to be named director of a national theater at the time of his death in an automobile accident.