Albert Camus
Personal Information
Description
Albert Camus was a French Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was a key philosopher of the 20th-century and his most famous work is the novel L'Étranger (The Stranger). In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was a group opposed to some tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature - after Rudyard Kipling - when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award. He is often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy that he was associated with during his own lifetime, but Camus himself rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…"
Books
Backpack Literature--Second Edition
Carry literature in your backpack as well as in your heart. With new contemporary and classic selections and an emphasis on writing, Backpack Literature will motivate you to read, think, and write about literature! You'll like the size because it easily fits into your backpack and makes taking the book to class a breeze. Backpack Literature includes a powerful range of stories, poems, and plays that will give you a chance to meet some of the world's most memorable characters. Written by two published poets, Kennedy and Gioia, this textbook is lively, accessible, and engaging. When you read literature, you learn how to see the world from another person's point of view- an ability that will benefit you in your professional and personal life.
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
From the Publisher: From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century-two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913-1960) deployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning. The Plague-written in 1947 and still profoundly relevant-is a riveting tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The Fall (1956), which takes the form of an astonishing confession by a French lawyer in a seedy Amsterdam bar, is a haunting parable of modern conscience in the face of evil. The six stories of Exile and the Kingdom (1957) represent Camus at the height of his narrative powers, masterfully depicting his characters-from a renegade missionary to an adulterous wife-at decisive moments of revelation. Set beside their fictional counterparts, Camus's famous essays "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "Reflections on the Guillotine" are all the more powerful and philosophically daring, confirming his towering place in twentieth-century thought.
Le premier homme
"The First Man is a radiant, deeply moving novel of childhood. Camus intended it as the opening book of a projected epic - his War and Peace - but in its storytelling magic and its evocative power, it has a satisfying completeness on its own, covering, as it does, the years of Camus's childhood in Algeria. As he recaptures memories of growing up fatherless with a deaf-mute mother and an illiterate, tyrannical grandmother, Camus renders the poverty of a working-class neighborhood transcended by all the sensuous pleasures that nourish this boy's young life - the escapes to the beach and to the soccer fields with his schoolmates, the joyous hunting expeditions in the backcountry with his uncle and his cronies, the sounds and smells of the streets and docks of Belcourt, the delights of the sun and the sea, and his overwhelming love for his silent mother. Throughout there is the undercurrent of a frustrating search for a father and the awareness of the escalating tension between Algeria and France. But with the miraculous intervention of a wise schoolteacher, the future suddenly opens up."--BOOK JACKET.
Le mythe de Sisyphe
«Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide.» Avec cette formule foudroyante, qui semble rayer d'un trait toute la philosophie, un jeune homme de moins de trente ans commence son analyse de la sensibilité absurde. Il décrit le «mal de l'esprit» dont souffre l'époque actuelle : «L'absurde naît de la confrontation de l'appel humain avec le silence déraisonnable du monde.»
Perrine's Literature--Structure, Sound, and Sense--Seventh Edition
This is a literature textbook for college students or Advanced Placement high school students.
Literature of Britain with World Classics
1 v.
L'exil et le royaume
"[Exile and the kingdom] consists of six "short stories". The term must be as loosely applied as was that of "novel" to last year's The Fall. The tales, precise, almost stark, are concerned with illuminating the dispossessed- symbolically projected in the exile of man. Two, "The Adulterous Woman" and "The Renegade" take the deserts for their scenes; its barrenness brings revelation to Janine, madness to the renegade missionary. In "The Artist At Work" he elucidates the encumbrance and distraction which love entails and the failure in flight from love. "The Silent Men" and "The Guest" are stoic statements for compassion, for no other reason than for men's need to draw comfort from one another. The stories have the purity, dignity and involution expected from Camus and will find their own critical audience." (Kirkus Review, 10 March 1957)
Noces / L'Été
The themes of poverty, sport, and the horror of human mortality all figure prominently in his volumes of so-called Algerian essays: Noces (Nuptials, 1938), and L'Eté (Summer, 1954).