91 Facts About Albert Camus

Albert Camus was the recipient of 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 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.

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 action while serving with a Zouave regiment in October 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 inhabitant of Algeria, which was a French territory from 1830 until 1962.

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

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 maintained great gratitude and affection towards Louis Germain throughout his life and he dedicated his speech for accepting the Nobel Prize to Germain.

In 1930, at the age of 17, Albert Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

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 as 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.

In 1934, Albert Camus was in a relationship with Simone Hie.

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

Albert Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935.

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

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.

Albert Camus continued his involvement with theatre and renamed his group.

In 1938, Albert Camus began working for the leftist newspaper, as he had strong anti-fascist feelings, and the rise of fascist regimes in Europe was worrying him.

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

Albert Camus was laid off from 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, which included Simone de Beauvoir and Andre Breton.

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

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

Albert Camus continued writing for the paper after the liberation of France, composing almost daily editorials under his real name.

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 invasion of 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 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.

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, Anne.

Albert Camus, who was in the passenger seat, died instantly, while Gallimard died five days later.

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.

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

Albert Camus's first publication was a play called, 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, the Greek and Roman goddess of Revenge.

The second was an unfinished novel, Le Premier homme, which Albert Camus was writing before he died.

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

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, or property, as well as the State and centralization.

Albert Camus believed 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.

Albert Camus kept a neutral stance during the Algerian Revolution.

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

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

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, 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".

In 1939, Albert Camus wrote a stinging series of articles for the 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 Arabs revolted 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 once said that the troubles in Algeria "affected him as others feel pain in their lungs".

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

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

David Sherman and others suggest the rivalry between Sartre and Albert Camus played a part in his rejection of existentialism.

Albert Camus addressed one of the fundamental questions of existentialism: the problem of suicide.

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

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; 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 The Myth of Sisyphus.

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

Albert Camus was cautious enough 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.

Albert Camus served as the inspiration for the Aquarius Gold Saint Camus in the classic anime and manga Saint Seiya.