Imam Al-kadhim Collage (IKC)

Department of English
Second Stage
Morning study /A/
Short Story

Albert Camus

By: Hussein Abbas Kadhim Karim

Supervised by: Muntadher Jedi

 Albert Camus
Author, Journalist, Playwright (1913-1960)

Early Life:

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, French Algeria.

His pied-noir family had little money. Camus’s father died in combat during
World War I, after which Camus lived with his
mother, who was partially deaf, in a low-income
section of Algiers.

Camus did well in school and was admitted to

the University of Algiers, where he studied
philosophy and played goalie for the soccer
team. He quit the team following a bout of
tuberculosis in 1930, thereafter focusing on
academic study. By 1936, he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees
in philosophy.

Personal Life:
Camus married and divorced twice as a young man,
stating his disapproval of the institution of marriage
throughout.
Also he has 2 children.

Influences:
Jean-Paul Sartre, Augustine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard and Jean Grenier .
Nobel Prize:
Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

Literary Career:

The dominant philosophical contribution of Camus's work is absurdism.

Elements of absurdism and existentialism are present in Camus's most
celebrated writing. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) elucidates his theory of the
absurd most directly. The protagonists of The Stranger (1942) and The Plague
(1947) must alKippso confront the absurdity of social and cultural orthodoxies,
with dire results.

As an Algerian, Camus brought a fresh, outsider perspective to French

literature of the period—related to but distinct from the metropolitan literature
of Paris. In addition to novels, he wrote and adapted plays, and was active in the
theater during the 1940s and '50s. His later literary works include The Fall
(1956) and Exile and the Kingdom (1957).

Some of his work:

Novels:

• The Stranger (L’Étranger, often translated as The Outsider. An alternate

meaning of “l’étranger” is “foreigner” ) (1942).
• The Plague (La Peste) (1947).
• The Fall (La Chute) (1956).
• A Happy Death (La Mort heureuse) (written 1936–38, published
posthumously 1971).
• The First Man (Le premier homme) (incomplete, published posthumously
1995).
Short stories:

Exile and the Kingdom (L’exil et le royaume) (collection, 1957), containing the
following short stories:

• “The Adulterous Woman” (La Femme adultère).

• “The Renegade or a Confused Spirit” (Le Renégat ou un esprit confus).
• “The Silent Men” (Les Muets).
• “The Guest” (L’Hôte).
• “Jonas, or the Artist at Work” (Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail).
• “The Growing Stone” (La Pierre qui pousse).

Plays:

• Caligula (performed 1945, written 1938).

• The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) (1944).
• The State of Siege (L'État de Siège) (1948).
• The Just Assassins (Les Justes) (1949).
• Requiem for a Nun (Requiem pour une nonne, adapted from William
Faulkner's novel by the same name) (1956).
• The Possessed (Les Possédés, adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's
novel Demons) (1959) .

Essays:

• The Crisis of Man (Lecture at Columbia University) (28 March 1946).

• Neither Victims nor Executioners (Series of essays in Combat) (1946).
• Why Spain? (Essay for the theatrical play L'Etat de Siège) (1948).
 • Summer (L'Été) (1954).
• Reflections on the Guillotine (Réflexions sur la guillotine) (Extended
essay, 1957).
• Create Dangerously (Essay on Realism and Artistic Creation, lecture at
the University of Uppsala in Sweden) (1957).
Non-fiction books:
• Betwixt and Between (L'envers et l'endroit, also translated as The
Wrong Side and the Right Side) (collection, 1937).
• Nuptials (Noces) (1938).
• The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942).
• The Rebel (L'Homme révolté) (1951).
• Algerian Chronicles (Chroniques algériennes) (1958, first English
translation published in 2013).

Legacy:
As novelist and playwright, moralist and political
theorist, Albert Camus after World War II became the
spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the
next, not only in France but also in Europe and
eventually the world. His writings, which addressed
themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien
universe, the estrangement of the individual from
himself, the problem of evil, and the pressing finality of
death, accurately reflected the alienation and
disillusionment of the postwar intellectual.
He is remembered, with Sartre, as a leading practitioner of the existential novel.
Though he understood the nihilism of many of his contemporaries, Camus also
argued the necessity of defending such values as truth, moderation, and justice.
In his last works he sketched the outlines of a liberal humanism that rejected the
dogmatic aspects of both Christianity and Marxism.

Death:
He died by a car accident on night January 4, 1960, in Burgundy, France.
References:

Albert Camus
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.biography.com/.amp/scholar/albert-camus

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Camus

Albert Camus Photo gallery

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/photo-gallery/