About
Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French writer and philosopher, born in Mondovi in French Algeria. During the Nazi occupation he edited the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) he named the absurd — the confrontation between the human need for meaning and 'the unreasonable silence of the world' — and asked whether, faced with it, life is worth living; The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956) carried the question into fiction. He refused the existentialist label, tracing his roots to Greek philosophy, Nietzsche and the seventeenth-century moralists, and The Rebel (1951), with its rejection of revolutionary violence, ended his friendship with Sartre. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at 44, and died in a car crash in 1960 with the manuscript of The First Man in the wreckage.
Key Contributions
- Named the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): the human need for meaning meeting a silent world
- Wrote The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956)
- Edited the Resistance newspaper Combat under the Nazi occupation
- Argued against revolutionary violence in The Rebel (1951), breaking with Sartre
- Received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at 44
Videos & Interviews
Connections
Sean Dorrance Kelly
In contrastDean of Arts and Humanities & Professor of Philosophy, Harvard
An opposition Kelly names himself. For years he would not teach The Myth of Sisyphus because of its opening question, and when he finally did he found Camus right about the day that goes by like a conveyor belt and wrong about what it reveals. His essay on aliveness is, he tells Lex Fridman, 'secretly a criticism of Camus': the deadened day is not the truth of a life but the felt absence of something we recognise in the moments we are most alive.
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Lex Fridman
InfluencedResearch Scientist, MIT; Host of the Lex Fridman Podcast
Camus is the existentialist Fridman keeps bringing into the room: 'probably my favorite', he tells Sean Kelly, and the one who didn't like the label. He puts Camus's lines to guests as a question rather than a quotation — to Joscha Bach, 'the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions', and then asks him to answer it. He closed the Kelly episode with Camus's invincible summer.
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David Whyte
KindredPoet & Philosopher
A pairing Whyte makes in passing and means. Explaining why weeping is a body growing large enough to hold what it has seen, he reaches for Camus — 'a great and loving imperative: live to the point of tears' — and insists it is not sentimentality but an invitation to feel everything, in beauty and in sorrow, without a barrier. Camus's lucid refusal to look away from the absurd and Whyte's refusal to look away from grief ask the same discipline of attention.
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David Foster Wallace
KindredNovelist & Essayist
Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the one serious philosophical problem and ends by asking us to imagine Sisyphus happy at his rock. Wallace's unfinished Pale King imagines a tax examiner so absorbed in the dullest work there is that he levitates. A pairing, not a lineage: both put the answer to meaninglessness inside the repetition rather than beyond it.
