99 Facts About Albert Camus

Albert Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history.

Albert Camus's works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.

Albert Camus was born in French Algeria to Pieds Noirs parents.

Albert Camus spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers.

Albert Camus was in Paris when the Germans invaded France during World War II in 1940.

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Albert Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper.

Albert Camus was politically active; he was part of the left that opposed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union because of their totalitarianism.

Albert Camus was part of many organisations seeking European integration.

Philosophically, Albert Camus's views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism.

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in a working-class neighbourhood in Mondovi, in French Algeria.

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.

Albert Camus was a second-generation French in Algeria, a French territory from 1830 until 1962.

Nevertheless, Albert Camus was a French citizen and enjoyed more rights than Arab and Berber Algerians under indigenat.

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.

Albert Camus was impressed by ancient Greek philosophers and Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1933, Albert Camus enrolled at the University of Algiers and completed his licence de philosophie in 1936; after presenting his thesis on Plotinus.

Albert Camus developed an interest in early Christian philosophers, but Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer had paved the way towards pessimism and atheism.

Albert Camus studied novelist-philosophers such as Stendhal, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Franz Kafka.

Albert Camus played goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger junior team from 1928 to 1930.

Albert Camus drew parallels among football, human existence, morality, and personal identity.

Albert Camus subsequently discovered she was in a relationship with her doctor at the same time and the couple later divorced.

Albert Camus saw it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria, " even though he was not a Marxist.

Albert Camus explained: "We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities.

In 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party was founded, and Albert Camus joined it after his mentor Grenier advised him to do so.

Albert Camus was expelled from the PCA for refusing to toe the party line.

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Albert Camus continued his involvement with theatre and renamed his group Theatre de l'Equipe.

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.

Alger republicain was banned in 1940 and Albert Camus flew to Paris to take a new job at Paris-Soir as editor-in-chief.

Albert Camus volunteered to join the army but was not accepted because he once had tuberculosis.

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.

Albert Camus returned to Paris where he met and became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Albert Camus became part of a circle of intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Breton, and others.

Albert Camus took an active role in the underground resistance movement against the Germans during the French Occupation.

Albert Camus continued writing for the paper after the liberation of France.

Albert Camus used a pseudonym for his Combat articles and used false ID cards to avoid being captured.

Albert Camus was now a celebrated writer known for his role in the Resistance.

Albert Camus gave lectures at various universities in the United States and Latin America during two separate trips.

Albert Camus visited Algeria once more, only to leave disappointed by the continued oppressive colonial policies, which he had warned about many times.

Albert Camus attacked totalitarian communism while advocating libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism.

Albert Camus was a strong supporter of European integration in various marginal organisations working towards that end.

Albert Camus raised his voice against the Soviet intervention in Hungary and the totalitarian tendencies of Franco's regime in Spain.

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.

Albert Camus's had a mental breakdown and needed hospitalisation in the early 1950s.

Albert Camus, who felt guilty, withdrew from public life and was slightly depressed for some time.

In 1957, Albert Camus received the news that he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Albert Camus was anticipating Andre Malraux would win the prestigious award.

Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times".

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.

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.

Albert Camus had predicted that this unfinished novel based on his childhood in Algeria would be his finest work.

Albert Camus was buried in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Vaucluse, France, where he had lived.

Albert Camus's friend Sartre read a eulogy, paying tribute to Camus's heroic "stubborn humanism".

Albert Camus's first publication was a play called Revolte dans les Asturies written with three friends in May 1936.

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.

Albert Camus then decided to distance himself from the Algerian War as he found the mental burden too heavy.

Albert Camus turned to theatre and the third cycle which was about love and the goddess Nemesis.

Albert Camus was a moralist; he claimed morality should guide politics.

Albert Camus was strongly critical of Marxism-Leninism, especially in the case of the Soviet Union, which he considered totalitarian.

Albert Camus rebuked those sympathetic to the Soviet model and their "decision to call total servitude freedom".

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.

Albert Camus had anarchist sympathies, which intensified in the 1950s, when he came to believe that the Soviet model was morally bankrupt.

Albert Camus was firmly against any kind of exploitation, authority, property, the State, and centralization.

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.

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.

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.

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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").

Albert Camus kept a neutral stance during the Algerian Revolution.

Albert Camus was supportive of Pierre Mendes' Unified Socialist Party and its approach to the crisis; Mendes advocated reconciliation.

Albert Camus traveled to Algeria to negotiate a truce between the two belligerents but was met with distrust by all parties.

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.

Albert Camus was sharply critical of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Albert Camus maintained his pacifism and resisted capital punishment anywhere in the world.

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.

Albert Camus lived in very poor conditions as a child but was a citizen of France and as such was entitled to citizens' rights; members of the country's Arab and Berber majority were not.

Albert Camus was a vocal advocate of the "new Mediterranean Culture".

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.

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.

Albert Camus advocated for economic, educational and political reforms as a matter of emergency.

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.

Albert Camus wrote a series of articles reporting on conditions, and advocating for French reforms and concessions to the demands of the Algerian people.

Albert Camus identified with the Pieds-Noirs such as his own parents and defended the French government's actions against the revolt.

Albert Camus argued the Algerian uprising was an integral part of the "new Arab imperialism" led by Egypt, and an "anti-Western" offensive orchestrated by Russia to "encircle Europe" and "isolate the United States".

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.

Albert Camus once confided that the troubles in Algeria "affected him as others feel pain in their lungs.

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.

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Albert Camus said his work, The Myth of Sisyphus, was a criticism of various aspects of existentialism.

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.

Albert Camus thought that the importance of history held by Marx and Sartre was incompatible with his belief in human freedom.

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.

Albert Camus wrote: "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.

Albert Camus wrote a play about the Roman emperor Caligula, pursuing an absurd logic, which was not performed until 1945.

Albert Camus follows Sartre's definition of the Absurd: "That which is meaningless.

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.

Albert Camus regretted the continued reference to himself as a "philosopher of the absurd".

Albert Camus showed less interest in the Absurd shortly after publishing Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

Albert Camus is known for articulating the case for revolting against any kind of oppression, injustice, or whatever disrespects the human condition.

Albert Camus is cautious enough, however, to set the limits on the rebellion.

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.

Albert Camus is remembered for his skeptical humanism and his support for political tolerance, dialogue, and civil rights.