Camus's The Plague

About The Plague

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was an Algerian-born French novelist, playwright, and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and is one of the defining literary-philosophical voices of the twentieth century. Born in a working-class French Algerian family (his father died in World War I before Camus could know him), he was educated in Algiers on a scholarship and worked as a journalist before the war. The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) announced his philosophy of the absurd: the confrontation between the human desire for meaning and the world's radical indifference. The Plague (La Peste, 1947) moved from the absurd to what Camus called revolt — the solidarity and resistance that are the appropriate human response to collective catastrophe. The Fall (La Chute, 1956), his last completed novel, is his darkest and most formally ironic. He was killed in a car accident at forty-six before completing The First Man, a posthumously published autobiographical novel about his Algerian childhood. He remains the most read and most internationally cited of the twentieth-century French novelists.