French-Algerian writer whose novels, essays, and plays made him the most widely read moral voice of the mid-20th century in the French-speaking world — and, after his Nobel Prize in 1957 (at 44, the second-youngest ever), beyond it. Camus grew up in working-class poverty in Algiers, survived tuberculosis that cut short a football career, edited the Resistance paper Combat during the Nazi occupation, and died in a car crash at 46 with the manuscript of The First Man in the wreckage.
Camus is usually grouped with the existentialists — he is Jean-Paul Sartre's contemporary and sometime friend — but he always rejected the label. His central concept is the absurd: the unbridgeable gap between the human demand for meaning and the silence of a world that does not supply it. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) asks whether this gap licenses suicide and answers no: the lucid confrontation with absurdity is itself a kind of victory, and Sisyphus rolling his rock eternally up the hill must be imagined happy.
The Stranger (1942) gives the absurd narrative flesh: Meursault, the man who will not lie about his feelings, is ultimately condemned less for the murder he commits than for his refusal to perform the emotions society expects. The Plague (1947) shifted register, offering a parable of moral resistance to occupation and evil that stands as one of the great 20th-century novels. The Rebel (1951) developed a non-nihilistic, anti-totalitarian ethics — and broke his friendship with Sartre, who refused its critique of revolutionary violence.