Word: camus
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...cell walls of 20th century man's bedeviled self, few writers have inscribed more powerful images of revolt against the "absurdity" of man's fate than France's Albert Camus. Last week the 43-year-old novelist, essayist, playwright, philosopher, editor and Resistance leader was decorated with literature's Legion of Honor, the 1957 Nobel prize, for "clearsighted earnestness which illuminates the problems of the human conscience of our times." Not since Rudyard Kipling received the award in 1907 at the age of 41 had it been granted to so young...
...chain-smoked cigarettes, embraced old Resistance buddies and held gracious court for Paris literati at his publisher's reception, Albert Camus admitted generously that he thought the award should have gone to André Malraux, "my early mentor." Even as he chatted, he inadvertently revealed the major qualities that won him the award−an unflagging humanism coupled with an unremitting skepticism. Pressed to make "one wish in the name of humanity," Camus unhesitatingly answered, "Freedom." Asked about his enemies, he replied with a shrewd Gallic twinkle: "One has to know how to make people forgive success...
Orphaned at the Marne. The successful Nobelman was born in the Algerian village of Mondovi, the son of a poor artisan. Orphaned at ten months by the Battle of the Marne, Camus never saw his French father, spent his sou-less boyhood in Algiers with his Spanish mother. Working his way towards a philosophy degree at the University of Algiers, young Camus was invalided by a bout with TB, which may have stimulated his lifelong preoccupation with death. He recovered completely, as he did from a brief bout with the Communist virus contracted at about the same time...
...Camus had rocketed into the Parisian literary firmament and the existential orbit of Jean-Paul Sartre. During the German occupation Camus fired the morale of the underground with eloquent pieces in his clandestine Combat. After the war he personified, with Sartre, the "engaged" writer, an active intellectual always ready to slide down the bell rope of the ivory tower and answer the fire alarms of left-wing social and economic causes. The two friends split irrevocably in 1952 over Communist ideology, with Camus holding that ends never justify means ("For a faraway city of which I am not sure...
...Madness of Excess. Operating from the underlying premise that God does not exist, Camus argued in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) that the certainty of death made life itself a ridiculous charade, and therefore "absurd." He likened man's lot to the somber task of the Greek mythic hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll down again, to the end of time. But from this recognition Camus drew his own peculiar sustenance: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged," i.e., knowledge...