ABSTRACT
The year 2013 marked the centenary of Albert Camus' birth, and there is little doubt that it occurred in the midst of a Camus revival. Camus was a mystic, yes, but "un mystico senza Dio", as Aniello Montano has called him. As Montano reports at the opening of his essay by that title, Camus asserted, in an article published in Le Monde, that he did not believe in God, but that at the same time he was not an atheist. The word "absurd" is the key to comprehending Camus' view of the meaning of life. It is the opening and central theme of his most influential philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus, written at roughly the same time, and published in the same year, 1942, as his equally influential novel, The Stranger. The Rebel was published in 1951; it is Camus' other more strictly philosophical book, along with The Myth of Sisyphus.
