Albert Camus

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides,...

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories...

Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a fathers death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boys attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus, The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the...

In the small coastal city of Oran, Algeria, rats begin rising up from the filth only to die as bloody heaps in the streets. Shortly after, an outbreak of the bubonic plague erupts and envelops the human population. Albert Camus' The Plague is a brilliant and haunting rendering of human perseverance and futility in the face of a relentless terror born of nature.

The Stranger (French: L'Étranger [l‿e.tʁɑ̃.ʒe]), also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella written by French author Albert Camus. The first of Camus' novels published in his lifetime, the story follows Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who, weeks after his mother's funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and...

For the first time in English, "Camus at Combat" presents all of Camus' World War II resistance and early postwar writings published in "Combat," the resistance newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947. Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom's barricades are once again being erected. Once...

Ce volume reunit les trente-quatre textes connus des prises de parole publiques d'Albert Camus, s'achevant sur la transcription inedite de son allocution au diner de L'Algerienne, le 13 novembre 1958 a Paris. D'une conference a l'autre, l'ecrivain diagnostique une "crise de l'homme", s'attache a redonner voix et dignite a ceux qui en ont ete prives par un demi-siecle de bruit et de fureur. C'est bien de civilisation qu'il s'agit ici. Pour Albert Camus,...

Cuando Albert Camus ganó en 1957 el Premio Nobel, la citación de la Academia al concederlo dejó constancia de una obra que se destacaba por "el profundo análisis del espíritu y la intensidad artística con que este ha sido interpretado, para mostrar un retrato de la existencia humana". Un ejemplo de su capacidad narrativa unida a un argumento interesante y lleno de episodios, se encuentra en su novela "El extranjero", obra del absurdo, donde...