Algiers goalkeeper won literature's Nobel at forty-four
Albert Camus, born 7 November 1913 in poor Mondovi, French Algeria, wrote novels and essays that fed absurdism—and heard existentialist labels he often refused. He took the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at forty-four. A 1960 car crash ended the work early.
His father, a farm labourer, was killed in action in 1914, and his deaf, illiterate mother raised him in poverty in the Belcourt quarter of Algiers. Teacher Louis Germain coached him free of charge for a 1924 scholarship to a lycée, against his grandmother's plan to send him out to work; decades later Camus wrote that his first thought on winning the Nobel, after his mother, was of Germain. From 1928 to 1930 he kept goal for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger juniors until tuberculosis, diagnosed at seventeen, ended sport.
Under mentor Jean Grenier he turned to philosophy, finishing a degree at the University of Algiers in 1936 with a thesis on Plotinus. He joined and left the French Communist Party, was expelled from the Algerian one for refusing the party line, and reported for Alger républicain until it was banned in 1940. In Paris he nearly finished his cycle on the absurd: The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and the play Caligula.
Rejected by the army because of his lungs, he went on to edit the clandestine Resistance paper Combat under a false name. A second cycle, on revolt, produced The Plague and later The Rebel, whose attack on totalitarian communism triggered his final break with Sartre. He rejected the existentialist label, founded a committee for European federation in 1944, and during the Algerian War argued for a pluralist Algeria.
The 1957 Nobel surprised him; at 44 he was the youngest literature laureate after Kipling and the first born in Africa. He spent the prize money staging Dostoyevsky's Demons in Paris and was drafting the autobiographical The First Man when he died on 4 January 1960.
Source: Albert Camus
