Camus was an Algerian French writer of many talents. Aside from the Nobel Prize he won, he is remembered for his novels L'Étranger (the Stranger) and La Peste (the Plague), and he was also an essayist, journalist, and political activist.
He was born in Algiers, where he grew up with his mother, brothers, and other relatives in a working-class neighborhood. He was a pied-noir, of European descent but born in Algeria during the colonial era.
Camus never knew his father; he was killed in WWI in the First Battle of Marne not long after his son was born.
Camus was a very bright student eager to learn and was noticed by an outstanding teacher, Louis Germain, in middle school, who helped him earn a scholarship to attend a secondary school in Algiers. There, he continued to study and also found a love of sports such as soccer, swimming, and boxing. However, his health prevented him from serious pursuit of athletics. He suffered several episodes of tuberculosis, starting in 1930, which also forced him to take a pause in his studies and move out of his family's cramped apartment. He stayed for a brief period with his uncle before moving out by himself.
He worked a myriad of jobs to keep himself afloat while studying philosophy at the Université d'Algiers. He was a candidate there for a qualification that would have enabled him to pursue a career in the university when another bout of tuberculosis disrupted his chance. Camus went to recover in Europe, before eventually returning to Algeria to begin a never-ending study of literature.
Throughout the 1930s, he read contemporary masterpieces and classic French literature and fell deeper in love with theatre as well.
L'Étranger
Camus began his first novel before WWII, but it was published in 1942. In French, it's called L'Étranger, which was translated as The Outsider for publication in the UK and The Stranger for US markets.
It tells the story of Meursault, a detached, indifferent French man in Algeria who kills an Arab man after his mother's death then is executed in payment for his crimes. This novel explores the edge of absurdity, which would become a theme in much of his writing. Camus, though he didn't call himself a philosopher, contemplated the meaning of life and certain elements of existentialism in his works.
Camus's philosophical ideas and his take on absurdity in this novel begged for an acceptance of the lack of life's meaning, and promoted rebellion by revelling in the joys we do find in our lives.
Much of this philosophy comes from the carnage of WWI and II and the inequalities Camus saw in his life. His father had been killed in the first world war, and he saw the unequal treatment of native Algerians by the colonizing French, another theme he presented in L'Étranger.
La Peste
Called The Plague in English, this story follows the effects of a bubonic plague outbreak in the city of Oran in Algeria. Many interpret the story as an allegory for life in France under Nazi occupation in 1940-1945.
Camus was part of the French resistance that defied Nazi rule. The novel shows the bravery of ordinary people when united against sudden evil.
The novel also contemplates morality and religion, with more elements of existentialism, and, of course, absurdism.
The plague in the book was likely inspired by one of the very real outbreaks of disease in the history of Oran, either the bubonic plague outbreak in 1944 (though the real outbreak had far fewer cases than the outbreak in the novel) or the devastating cholera outbreak that struck in 1849.
In 2020, sales of the book soared as modern readers struggling with the COVID pandemic related all too well with the premise of the story.
Legacy
Camus received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” He was a young recipient of the award, at only 44 years old. In his speech, he humbly declared he would have given the award to André Malraux, another brilliant writer of the time, and thanked Louis Germain, his middle school teacher who helped him pursue his education and early passions 34 years prior.
He died in a car accident in France just three years after receiving his Nobel Prize, but his accomplishments and ideas are still the subjects of study in literary circles. The way he mixed his study of philosophy so deeply into his work, and combined elements from so many different lines of thought, from nihilism to existentialism to absurdism, continues to earn him new readers and inspire minds.
And beyond his writing, he was a man who, throughout his life, stood for what he believed in, as a journalist, activist, and part of the anti-Nazi French Resistance.
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