Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher, novelist and playwright and one of the defining moral voices of the twentieth century. Through such works as A Happy Death, Caligula and his masterpieces The Stranger and The Plague, he explored the absurd, freedom and solidarity against the nihilism of his age.

Raised in poverty in Algiers, Camus joined the Resistance in Paris during the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at forty-four. His philosophy of the absurd never ended in despair, insisting instead on revolt, lucidity and love as responses to an indifferent world — a stance that made him an emblem of moral seriousness.