Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria, and grew up poor in Algiers. He joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s but was expelled after refusing to play down French colonialism in Algeria. During the German occupation he joined the Resistance and in 1944 became editor of the underground newspaper Combat. His works include The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Rebel (1951). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in January 1960, aged 46.

Camus is admired as a moral voice who rejected terror from both left and right, opposed the death penalty and refused to excuse Soviet crimes at a time when much of the French left defended them. The Rebel and his public break with Sartre made him a leading figure of the anti-totalitarian left. Critics on the left called him a reactionary for opposing the FLN and Algerian independence on its terms, and some later critics described his silence on colonialism as moral cowardice. A remark about bombings in Algiers after his 1957 Nobel Prize, often reported as a choice between justice and his mother, remains controversial. His novels and essays are still widely read as a defense of human dignity without religious or ideological certainty.