ABSTRACT
Albert Camus (1913–60) was born into a very poor, working-class family in Algiers, the capital of the then French colony of Algeria. His grandmother and mother were both illiterate. All his life he was subject to bouts of tuberculosis which had the effect of ending a possible career as a professional soccer player (he was a fine goalkeeper). Moving to Paris, he became actively and courageously involved in the resistance to the Nazi occupation, editing the underground newspaper Combat. (As with Sartre, the existential issues about which he wrote arose not out of thin air but out of his life.) Though he spent most of his working life in Paris, he retained an intense love for his homeland that is often reflected in his writings. Although belonging, in general, to the political left, his ties to his homeland (where his mother still lived) made it impossible for him, during the Algerian war of independence (1954–62), unambiguously to identify himself with the standard left-wing demand for Algeria’s immediate independence. (Given a choice between justice and my mother, he said, I choose my mother.) This led to a break with the by-now-Marxist Sartre, who found Camus’ position lacking the necessary black-and-whiteness. Camus had great personal charm and, with a cigarette permanently in the corner of his mouth, looked (as he knew) like Humphrey Bogart. This no doubt contributed to his enormous success with women. His appetite for sexual pleasure was insatiable and led to his being perpetually unfaithful to both his wife and current mistress. (As we shall see, this and other aspects of his life and personality are reflected in his philosophy.) He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and in 1960 died in an accident in a sports car driven by his friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Both Camus and Gallimard were addicted to fast driving.
