Jaga: My aunt said he was depressed due to illness when she met him in Paris.
More on Camus. Carl:
www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/intro.php?ikey=3Search
www.littlebluelight.com Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
French/Algerian writer known for his depiction of man's struggles
with absurdity and for his attempt to ground politics in a moral
humanism.
Quote
There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very
denial may be born.
Other occupations Journalist, Editor, Theatrical Producer, Actor,
Publishing House Reader
Albert Camus was born in 1913 to a poor working class family in Mondovi, a
coastal town in the French colony of Algeria. When Albert was one year
old, his father was killed in World War I, leaving the young boy to be
raised by his illiterate mother, who worked as a charwoman, and his stern
grandmother. Camus' family lived in a small apartment without electricity
in Belcourt, one of the poorer districts of Mondovi. The family supported
themselves with the help of Camus' uncle. Though Camus' mother was not
overly affectionate, her ‘heroic’ efforts to keep her family afloat
inspired Albert's life long devotion and admiration. Rather than making
him bitter, the poverty of Camus' early years developed a sense of
sympathy with all mankind that would later express itself in his literary
work and political activism. In school, one of his teachers, Louis
Germain, recognized Camus' intelligence and helped him win a scholarship
to one of the better lycées (high school) that would enable him to attend
college. Camus greatly appreciated Germain's effort and dedicated his 1957
Nobel Prize to his former teacher. Camus was later mentored by his lycée
philosophy professor, Jean Grenier, who exposed Camus to the writers that
would become seminal influences, such as Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and
Nietzsche. Camus was very active in sports, especially soccer, which he
credited with forming his sense of morality and duty to man. His
involvement with sports abruptly ended when he contracted tuberculosis in
1930 at the age of seventeen. Camus left his family's crowded, unhealthy
apartment and moved in with his wealthier uncle, who provided the teenager
with clothes, books and an example of a cultured social life. The physical
and emotional effects of tuberculosis, including bouts of depression,
would plague Camus the rest of his life. In 1933, Camus began studying
philosophy at the University of Algiers while working odd jobs. A year
later, Camus married Simone Hié, a loose, tempestuous heroin addict, who
he eventually left in 1936 and divorced in 1940. He joined the Communist
Party in 1935, helping with their culture activities and directing their
in-house theater company, the Labor Theater. He excelled in his studies
and his thesis on Plotinus and Augustine opened the door for an academic
career. Unfortunately, his tubercular condition prevented him from taking
the agrégation exam needed for an academic career. In 1937, he published a
book of essays L'Envers et l'endroit and broke with the Communist party,
though he continued to be heavily involved in acting, producing and
adapting works for his theater company that brought theatrical productions
to the working class. Without the possibility of an academic career, Camus
became a journalist for a leftist newspaper in 1938, covering local news,
the courts and contributing the occasional book review. After the paper
was forced to shutdown in 1939, Camus moved to Paris with the help of the
paper's editor. World War II forced Camus to retreat to Lyon, where he
fell in love with Francine Faure, another French North African, who he
married in 1940. The influential friends he made while in France helped
him secure the publication of The Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus by
Gallimard in 1942. Both works caused an immediate stir in the intellectual
circles of occupied Paris. Camus had moved with his wife to her native
city of Oran, a coastal city in North Africa, where he held a number of
odd jobs. The couple briefly returned to Paris before unfortunate
circumstance separated them for two years. Francine returned to Oran while
Camus, who had intended to follow her, remained trapped in Paris by the
war. Camus joined the French Resistance and became editor of Combat, the
leading underground paper during the occupation. He continued to write
both novels and plays while enjoying the Parisian intellectual cafe
society where he met such luminaries as André Gide and Jean Paul Sartre.
In 1943, he became a reader for Gallimard. In 1944, he was reunited with
his wife and Combat grew into the leading political daily of postwar
France. He left Combat in 1947 after he felt it had lost its edge. While
his domestic life brightened with the birth of twins in 1945 and he
enjoyed his first success on the stage with his play Caligula, Camus felt
increasingly alienated from his Left Bank friends, culminating in an
public and acrimonious break with Sartre in 1952. During trips to the
United States and South America in the late 1940's, Camus had a few
extramarital affairs. In the 1950's he had a long-standing affair with
Maria Casarès, an actress in several of his plays. The fairly public
affair severely strained his marriage. The civil war in Algeria, pitting
the native Algerians against French colonialists like himself, challenged
Camus' political commitments. Unable to find a suitable compromise, Camus
fell silent on the issue. These domestic and political difficulties
brought on a severe case of writer's block, which Camus overcame by
returning to the theater and adapting the works of Dostoevsky and Faulkner
for the stage. He also brought out a book of older essays and briefly
returned to journalism for the magazine L'Express, airing his views on the
Algerian situation at last. In 1956, he published The Fall, his last
novel, and a collection of short stories. Camus was awarded the Nobel
Prize in 1957, becoming the second youngest writer to receive it.
Surprisingly, or perhaps modestly, Camus said he would award the prize to
André Malraux. Camus had begun working on an autobiographical novel about
his youth in Algeria, The First Man, when he was killed in an automobile
accident in 1960 while riding as a passenger in a car driven by Michel
Gallimard, a relative of his publisher. Camus had once said he couldn't
imagine a death more meaningless than dying in a car accident - a death
perhaps ironically appropriate, or perhaps simply tragic, for a writer so
keenly aware of the absurdity and meaninglessness of life.
Influences
St. Augustine, The Bible, Church Fathers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andre
Gide, Søren Kierkegaard, Andre Malraux, Karl Marx, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Western and Eastern Mysticism, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Blaise Pascal, Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Andre de Richard,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, Influenced
Themes: The alienation, disillusionment and resulting nihilism that
confronted man after the horrors of WWII. The absurdity of life, yet the
necessity of some moral sensibility. An emergent liberal humanist morality
exclusive of Christian and Marxist dogmas.
Style: His simple and clear style has made him a sort of Existentialist
Hemingway. His simple short sentences are composed of only the essential -
minimal descriptions of settings, clear evocations of psychological states
- which produce a stark atmosphere and perfectly accentuates his subject
matter. Though short, the sentences are not choppy. Instead, they provide
a fluid rhythm that propels the reader (which is perhaps why he is still
one of the bestselling authors in France today).
Major Works
The Stranger (1942)
A man kills an Arab on an Algerian beach and claims the sun made him do it
during his trial. He is sentenced to death as much for failing to cry
after his mother's death as for the murder itself. The novel is a
groundbreaking exploration of 'the nakedness of man faced with the
absurd.'
Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
An analysis of the contemporary malady of recognizing the absurdity of
human life using the Myth of Sisyphus, a Greek legend that tells of a man
eternally condemned to roll a heavy boulder up a hill only to have it roll
down again.
The Fall (1956)
A formerly successful and well liked Parisian lawyer waylays an unnamed
traveler in Amsterdam to confess his descent into callous duplicity
precipitated by hearing a woman's suicidal jump into a river and doing
nothing to rescue her.
