Born in Mondovi, Algeria, to a French family, Albert Camus (1913–60) would make his mark as a philosophical novelist and essayist. At the age of seventeen he contracted tuberculosis, which effectively ended his playing goalkeeper for the football team at the University of Algiers. It also caused him to pursue his studies part-time, and he took odd jobs including working as a private tutor.

He joined the anti-German resistance in Paris during World War II. His most well-known writings include the novel The Stranger (written in 1940, published in 1942) and a book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus (written in 1941, published in 1943). Both explore the theme of the “absurd.”

As part of his involvement with the resistance during the war, Camus edited an underground newspaper, Combat. In fact, Camus became the paper's editor in 1943, and when the Allies liberated Paris, Camus reported on the last of the fighting. Few French editors besides Camus publicly expressed opposition to America's dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 8, 1945. He resigned from the paper when he thought it was becoming too commercial two years later.

At that time he made the acquaintance of Jean-Paul Sartre. The two became habitués of the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, where talk of politics and existentialism flowed freely. Camus made frequent stops in the United States, where he lectured on French thinking. He also voiced strong criticisms of Communist ideology, which led him to separate from Sartre.

Human rights became his focus in the 1950s. He protested Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe. He was also a vigilant pacifist and voiced his opposition to capital punishment around the globe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, not for his novel The Fall, published that year, but for his writings against capital punishment in the essay “Reflexions Sur La Guillotine.”

Camus died suddenly in a car accident on January 4, 1960. The train ticket found in his pocket might suggest that he had planned to travel by train but changed his mind. Oddly, Camus had uttered a remark earlier in his life that the most absurd way to die would be in a car accident.

The Absurd

Camus describes the absurd both as the human condition and as “a widespread sensitivity of our times.” While several of Camus's works deal with the absurdity of human existence, The Myth of Sisyphus may use the absurd in the most direct way. The absurd can be defined as the confrontation between yourself — with your longing for meaning, rationality, and justice — and an “indifferent silent universe.” Condemned by the Gods to the endless, futile task of rolling a rock up a mountain (which would roll back down before he could get it to the peak), Sisyphus was a kind of metaphor for the human condition: he is trying to fulfill a task, but his effort is laborious and hopeless.

In an essay entitled “An Absurd Reasoning,” Camus wrote: “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” But it's what Camus does with the absurd that makes up the most interesting part of his philosophy. It would be one thing to recognize our human condition but suggest nothing to do in response to that condition. Camus does both.

He does advise that you not run from your human condition. You should not commit suicide. Instead you must embrace the absurd. He calls keeping the absurd alive an “attitude of permanent revolution.” He writes:

Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. The absurd dies only when we turn away from it. One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity…. It challenges the world anew every second.

Like the heroic doctor in his novel The Plague, one must persist in the face of absurdity. One must live on with persistence and valor, for this is all there is.