All about Albert Camus-An Illustrated Book
By Students’ Academy
Copyright@2011Students’ Academy
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1
Introduction
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Drean, which was earlier known as Mondovi, in French Algeria, to a Pied-Noir settler family.
Camus was a French Algerian author, philosopher, journalist, and a footballer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Among the eminent philosophers of 20th century, Albert Camus is said to be one of the most important figure; He has written extensively on life, its problems, meaninglessness of human existence, and absurd. His most widely read and appreciated work is “The Stranger”.
Albert Camus was a very keen observer of the contemporary society, and consequently his efforts were not limited to writings only; his mind seriously thought about the trends.
Albert Camus was opposed to some of the tendencies of the surrealistic movement of Andre Breton, and to answer that he founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement.
Only Rudyard Kipling was the younger recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature than Albert Camus who received the coveted prize for his highly admirable literary creations.
Unfortunately, two years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus passed away in an automobile accident.
Albert Camus is said to be a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy that he was associated with during his own lifetime, but Camus himself rejected this particular label. During an interview in 1945, Camus refuted that he was in any way associated with the movement: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."
His effective views on life and its meaninglessness led to the rise of the modern philosophy known as absurdism. Camus spoke against the philosophy of nihilism but he believed in individual freedom. Many of his essays were solely dedicated to absurd and suicide. In his essays, he often alluded to Sisyphus, who had been punished to do the repeated task of rolling a rock up a hill. The most famous of his essays which opposed the philosophy of nihilism is “The Rebel”.
Chapter 2
Childhood and Early Years
Camus was from a Pied-Noir settler family. The term Pied-Noir was generally used to refer to colonist of French Algeria until Algerian independence in 1962.
Albert Camus’s Spanish mother was half-deaf. His father Lucien was a poor agricultural worker; he died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I, while serving as a member of the Zouave infantry regiment.
His poverty ridden childhood did not give Albert Camus much choice in the Belcourt section of Algiers. In 1923, he was accepted into the lycée and eventually to the University of Algiers.
He was a good football player but in 1930 he contracted tuberculosis and it put an end to his sports career. He was a goalkeeper for his university team. During his sports activities, he did not pay much attention to his studies and often made his studies a part-time pursuit. He took odd jobs including private tutor, car parts clerk and work for the Meteorological Institute. He completed his licence de philosophie (BA) in 1935; in May 1936, he successfully presented his thesis on Plotinus, Néo-Platonisme et Pensée Chrétienne, for his diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis).
In 1935, in the season of Spring, Albert Camus joined the French Communist Party to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria." He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, but he confessed in his writing: “We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities".
Algerian Communist Party was in favour of independence, and Albert Camus joined the PCA in 1936. In a short period of time he got into trouble with his Communist party comrades. As a result, he was denounced as a Trotskyite and expelled from the party in 1937.
Having left the Algerian Communist Party, Albert Camus went on to be associated with the French anarchist movement. He was first introduced at a meeting of the Cercle des Etudiants Anarchistes in 1948 by Andre Prudhommeaux.
Albert Camus began to write for the anarchist publications and he supported the cause of the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. Even in 1956 he supported the anarchists. He supported the Polish and Hungarian Revolution.
In the year 1934, Albert Camus married Simone Hie. She was a morphine addict. Their marriage did not last long because there were infidelities on both sides.
After his separation from his wife, Camus founded “Worker’s Theatre” in the year 1937. During the period of following two years he wrote for a socialist paper called “Alger Republicain”. He mostly wrote about the poor farmers and he supported them. He was forced to lose his job on account of his biased writings.
He tried to join the French Army but he was rejected because he was suffering from consumption (T.B.).
In the year 1940 he married Francine Faure. She was a pianist and mathematician. Camus loved her but he spoke against the institution of marriage. He said that the institution of marriage was unnatural.
His wife gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean on 5th of September in the year 1945. Notwithstanding this, he often told his friends that he was not the man who should be married.
Camus had many love affairs, particularly an irregular and eventually public affair with the Spanish-born actress Maria Casares. He continued his writing efforts and in the same year he started working for the magazine called Paris-Soir.
Albert Camus was a pacifist by nature and he was against war. When the Second World War started Camus was in Paris to witness how the Wehrmacht took over.
It was the day of 15 December 1941 when Albert Camus witnessed the execution of Gabriel Péri. It was an event that Camus later said crystallized his revolt against the Germans. Shortly after that incident, he moved to Bordeaux alongside the rest of the staff of Paris-Soir. In the same year he finished his first books, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He returned briefly to Oran, Algeria in 1942.
Chapter 3
Literary Career
The period during the War was quite the time of struggle for Albert Camus. He joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. This group worked against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre "Beauchard". Camus became the paper's editor in 1943, and, when the Allies liberated Paris, he reported on the last of the fighting.
Albert Camus was dead against the use of atomic bomb in Hiroshima. He was one of the few French writers and editors who openly expressed their opposition to the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima soon after the event on 8 August 1945. This tragic event impacted his mind very deeply and he resigned from Combat in 1947, when it became a commercial paper. Having left the paper, Albert Camus came into contact with Jean-Paul Sartre.
When the war was over, Camus, Sartre, and other friends began to frequently visit the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.
Camus was a very keen observer of French thinking. He visited the United States and there he lectured about French thinking. Camus criticized the Communist doctrine though he was politically associated with the left. Owing to this, he had to lose his good friend, Sartre.
The symptoms of tuberculosis returned in 1949 and he lived in seclusion for two years. In 1951 he published The Rebel, a philosophical analysis of rebellion and revolution which made clear why he had rejected Communism. Many of his colleagues and fellow writers were deeply upset when the book was published, and as a result he had to leave his friend Sartre forever. The work was not appreciated and he was deeply depressed. Now he began to translate plays.
His idea of the absurd was his first most important contribution to philosophy. He held that it was the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he explained in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as The Stranger and The Plague.
Though he had separated from his "study partner", Sartre, some critics and analysts still argue that Camus falls into the existentialist camp. However, he rejected that label himself in his essay Enigma and elsewhere. The current confusion may still arise, as many recent applications of existentialism have much in common with many of Camus's practical ideas (see: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death). However, the personal understanding he had of the world (e.g. "a benign indifference", in The Stranger), and every vision he had for its progress (e.g. vanquishing the "adolescent furies" of history and society, in The Rebel) undoubtedly set him apart.
Now Camus decided to devote himself to human rights. In 1952 he resigned from his work for UNESCO when the UN accepted Spain as a member under the leadership of General Franco. In 1953 he criticized Soviet methods to crush a workers' strike in East Berlin. In 1956 he protested against similar methods in Poland (protests in Poznań) and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution in October.