Albert Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history.
FactSnippet No. 568,716 |
Albert Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history.
FactSnippet No. 568,716 |
Albert Camus's works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
FactSnippet No. 568,717 |
Albert Camus spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers.
FactSnippet No. 568,719 |
Albert Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper.
FactSnippet No. 568,721 |
Albert Camus was politically active; he was part of the left that opposed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union because of their totalitarianism.
FactSnippet No. 568,722 |
Albert Camus was part of many organisations seeking European integration.
FactSnippet No. 568,723 |
Philosophically, Albert Camus's views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism.
FactSnippet No. 568,724 |
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in a working-class neighbourhood in Mondovi, in French Algeria.
FactSnippet No. 568,725 |
Albert Camus never knew his father, Lucien Camus, a poor French agricultural worker killed in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I Camus, his mother and other relatives lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers.
FactSnippet No. 568,726 |
Albert Camus was a second-generation French in Algeria, a French territory from 1830 until 1962.
FactSnippet No. 568,727 |
Nevertheless, Albert Camus was a French citizen and enjoyed more rights than Arab and Berber Algerians under indigenat.
FactSnippet No. 568,728 |
Under the influence of his teacher Louis Germain, Albert Camus gained a scholarship in 1924 to continue his studies at a prestigious lyceum near Algiers.
FactSnippet No. 568,729 |
Albert Camus was impressed by ancient Greek philosophers and Friedrich Nietzsche.
FactSnippet No. 568,730 |
Albert Camus developed an interest in early Christian philosophers, but Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer had paved the way towards pessimism and atheism.
FactSnippet No. 568,732 |
Albert Camus studied novelist-philosophers such as Stendhal, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Franz Kafka.
FactSnippet No. 568,733 |
Albert Camus played goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger junior team from 1928 to 1930.
FactSnippet No. 568,734 |
Albert Camus drew parallels among football, human existence, morality, and personal identity.
FactSnippet No. 568,735 |
Albert Camus subsequently discovered she was in a relationship with her doctor at the same time and the couple later divorced.
FactSnippet No. 568,736 |
Albert Camus explained: "We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities.
FactSnippet No. 568,738 |
In 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party was founded, and Albert Camus joined it after his mentor Grenier advised him to do so.
FactSnippet No. 568,739 |
Albert Camus was expelled from the PCA for refusing to toe the party line.
FactSnippet No. 568,740 |
Albert Camus continued his involvement with theatre and renamed his group Theatre de l'Equipe.
FactSnippet No. 568,741 |
In 1938, Albert Camus began working for the leftist newspaper Alger republicain as he had strong anti-fascist feelings, and the rise of fascist regimes in Europe was worrying him.
FactSnippet No. 568,742 |
Alger republicain was banned in 1940 and Albert Camus flew to Paris to take a new job at Paris-Soir as editor-in-chief.
FactSnippet No. 568,743 |
Albert Camus volunteered to join the army but was not accepted because he once had tuberculosis.
FactSnippet No. 568,744 |
Albert Camus was laid off from Paris-Soir and ended up in Lyon, where he married pianist and mathematician Francine Faure on 3 December 1940.
FactSnippet No. 568,745 |
Albert Camus returned to Paris where he met and became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre.
FactSnippet No. 568,746 |
Albert Camus became part of a circle of intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Breton, and others.
FactSnippet No. 568,747 |
Albert Camus took an active role in the underground resistance movement against the Germans during the French Occupation.
FactSnippet No. 568,748 |
Albert Camus continued writing for the paper after the liberation of France.
FactSnippet No. 568,749 |
Albert Camus used a pseudonym for his Combat articles and used false ID cards to avoid being captured.
FactSnippet No. 568,750 |
Albert Camus was now a celebrated writer known for his role in the Resistance.
FactSnippet No. 568,751 |
Albert Camus gave lectures at various universities in the United States and Latin America during two separate trips.
FactSnippet No. 568,752 |
Albert Camus visited Algeria once more, only to leave disappointed by the continued oppressive colonial policies, which he had warned about many times.
FactSnippet No. 568,753 |
Albert Camus attacked totalitarian communism while advocating libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism.
FactSnippet No. 568,754 |
Albert Camus was a strong supporter of European integration in various marginal organisations working towards that end.
FactSnippet No. 568,755 |
Albert Camus had numerous affairs, particularly an irregular and eventually public affair with the Spanish-born actress Maria Casares, with whom he had extensive correspondence.
FactSnippet No. 568,757 |
Albert Camus's had a mental breakdown and needed hospitalisation in the early 1950s.
FactSnippet No. 568,758 |
Albert Camus, who felt guilty, withdrew from public life and was slightly depressed for some time.
FactSnippet No. 568,759 |
In 1957, Albert Camus received the news that he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
FactSnippet No. 568,760 |
Albert Camus was anticipating Andre Malraux would win the prestigious award.
FactSnippet No. 568,761 |
Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times".
FactSnippet No. 568,762 |
Albert Camus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin.
FactSnippet No. 568,763 |
Albert Camus had spent the New Year's holiday of 1960 at his house in Lourmarin, Vaucluse with his family, and his publisher Michel Gallimard of Editions Gallimard, along with Gallimard's wife, Janine, and daughter.
FactSnippet No. 568,764 |
Albert Camus had predicted that this unfinished novel based on his childhood in Algeria would be his finest work.
FactSnippet No. 568,765 |
Albert Camus was buried in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Vaucluse, France, where he had lived.
FactSnippet No. 568,766 |
Albert Camus's friend Sartre read a eulogy, paying tribute to Camus's heroic "stubborn humanism".
FactSnippet No. 568,767 |
Albert Camus's first publication was a play called Revolte dans les Asturies written with three friends in May 1936.
FactSnippet No. 568,768 |
Albert Camus began his work on the second cycle while he was in Algeria, in the last months of 1942, just as the Germans were reaching North Africa.
FactSnippet No. 568,769 |
Albert Camus then decided to distance himself from the Algerian War as he found the mental burden too heavy.
FactSnippet No. 568,770 |
Albert Camus turned to theatre and the third cycle which was about love and the goddess Nemesis.
FactSnippet No. 568,771 |
Albert Camus was a moralist; he claimed morality should guide politics.
FactSnippet No. 568,772 |
Albert Camus was strongly critical of Marxism-Leninism, especially in the case of the Soviet Union, which he considered totalitarian.
FactSnippet No. 568,773 |
Albert Camus rebuked those sympathetic to the Soviet model and their "decision to call total servitude freedom".
FactSnippet No. 568,774 |
Active in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Albert Camus wrote for and edited the Resistance journal Combat.
FactSnippet No. 568,775 |
Albert Camus had anarchist sympathies, which intensified in the 1950s, when he came to believe that the Soviet model was morally bankrupt.
FactSnippet No. 568,776 |
Albert Camus was firmly against any kind of exploitation, authority, property, the State, and centralization.
FactSnippet No. 568,777 |
Albert Camus, however, opposed revolution, separating the rebel from the revolutionary and believing that the belief in "absolute truth", most often assuming the guise of history or reason, inspires the revolutionary and leads to tragic results.
FactSnippet No. 568,778 |
Albert Camus believes that rebellion is spurred by our outrage over the world's lack of transcendent significance, while political rebellion is our response to attacks against the dignity and autonomy of the individual.
FactSnippet No. 568,779 |
Albert Camus opposed political violence, tolerating it only in rare and very narrowly defined instances, as well as revolutionary terror which he accused of sacrificing innocent lives on the altar of history.
FactSnippet No. 568,780 |
Albert Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La Revolution proletarienne (The Proletarian Revolution), and Solidaridad Obrera ("Workers' Solidarity"), the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) ("National Confederation of Labor").
FactSnippet No. 568,781 |
Albert Camus kept a neutral stance during the Algerian Revolution.
FactSnippet No. 568,782 |
Albert Camus was supportive of Pierre Mendes' Unified Socialist Party and its approach to the crisis; Mendes advocated reconciliation.
FactSnippet No. 568,783 |
Albert Camus traveled to Algeria to negotiate a truce between the two belligerents but was met with distrust by all parties.
FactSnippet No. 568,784 |
In one, often misquoted incident, Albert Camus confronted an Algerian critic during his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, rejecting the false equivalence of justice with revolutionary terrorism: "People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers.
FactSnippet No. 568,785 |
Albert Camus maintained his pacifism and resisted capital punishment anywhere in the world.
FactSnippet No. 568,787 |
Albert Camus wrote an essay against capital punishment in collaboration with Arthur Koestler, the writer, intellectual, and founder of the League Against Capital Punishment entitled Reflexions sur la peine capitale, published by Calmann-Levy in 1957.
FactSnippet No. 568,788 |
Albert Camus supported the Blum–Viollette proposal to grant Algerians full French citizenship in a manifesto with arguments defending this assimilative proposal on radical egalitarian grounds.
FactSnippet No. 568,791 |
In 1939, Albert Camus wrote a stinging series of articles for the Alger republicain on the atrocious living conditions of the inhabitants of the Kabylie highlands.
FactSnippet No. 568,792 |
Albert Camus advocated for economic, educational and political reforms as a matter of emergency.
FactSnippet No. 568,793 |
In 1945, following the Setif and Guelma massacre after Arab revolts against French mistreatment, Albert Camus was one of only a few mainland journalists to visit the colony.
FactSnippet No. 568,794 |
Albert Camus wrote a series of articles reporting on conditions, and advocating for French reforms and concessions to the demands of the Algerian people.
FactSnippet No. 568,795 |
Albert Camus identified with the Pieds-Noirs such as his own parents and defended the French government's actions against the revolt.
FactSnippet No. 568,796 |
Albert Camus's position drew much criticism from the left and later postcolonial literary critics, such as Edward Said, who were opposed to European imperialism, and charged that Camus's novels and short stories are plagued with colonial depictions - or conscious erasures - of Algeria's Arab population.
FactSnippet No. 568,798 |
Albert Camus once confided that the troubles in Algeria "affected him as others feel pain in their lungs.
FactSnippet No. 568,799 |
Albert Camus himself said his philosophical origins lay in ancient Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, and 17th-century moralists whereas existentialism arises from 19th- and early 20th-century philosophy such as Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Heidegger.
FactSnippet No. 568,800 |
Albert Camus said his work, The Myth of Sisyphus, was a criticism of various aspects of existentialism.
FactSnippet No. 568,801 |
Albert Camus was rejecting existentialism as a philosophy, but his critique was mostly focused on Sartrean existentialism, and to a lesser extent on religious existentialism.
FactSnippet No. 568,802 |
Albert Camus thought that the importance of history held by Marx and Sartre was incompatible with his belief in human freedom.
FactSnippet No. 568,803 |
Albert Camus's belief was that the absurd—life being void of meaning, or man's inability to know that meaning if it were to exist—was something that man should embrace.
FactSnippet No. 568,804 |
Albert Camus wrote: "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.
FactSnippet No. 568,805 |
Albert Camus wrote a play about the Roman emperor Caligula, pursuing an absurd logic, which was not performed until 1945.
FactSnippet No. 568,806 |
Albert Camus follows Sartre's definition of the Absurd: "That which is meaningless.
FactSnippet No. 568,807 |
The Absurd is created because man, who is placed in an unintelligent universe, realises that human values are not founded on a solid external component; or as Albert Camus himself explains, the Absurd is the result of the "confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
FactSnippet No. 568,808 |
Albert Camus regretted the continued reference to himself as a "philosopher of the absurd".
FactSnippet No. 568,809 |
Albert Camus showed less interest in the Absurd shortly after publishing Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
FactSnippet No. 568,810 |
Albert Camus is known for articulating the case for revolting against any kind of oppression, injustice, or whatever disrespects the human condition.
FactSnippet No. 568,811 |
Albert Camus is cautious enough, however, to set the limits on the rebellion.
FactSnippet No. 568,812 |
Albert Camus delineates the difference between revolution and rebellion and notices that history has shown that the rebel's revolution might easily end up as an oppressive regime; he therefore places importance on the morals accompanying the revolution.
FactSnippet No. 568,813 |
Albert Camus is remembered for his skeptical humanism and his support for political tolerance, dialogue, and civil rights.
FactSnippet No. 568,814 |