On December 10, 1957, the famous philosopher and writer Albert Camus attended the Nobel Prize ceremony. It was the eleventh time that Camus was included among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. This time, however, the Swedish Academy chose the French author to present the prize, honoring him “for his important literary production, which with pure honesty illuminates the problems of human consciousness in our time.” Upon receiving his award, Camus stated that “personally I cannot live without my art, but I have never placed this art above all else. […] In my eyes, art is not a solitary pleasure, it is a means of moving the largest possible number of people.”
Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913 in Montovy, Algeria, then a French territory, to a poor family of French immigrants. He never met Lucien’s Alsatian farmer father, as he was killed in the first operations of World War I in the fall of 1914. He then moved with his mother Catherine Hélène and other relatives to Algiers, a city in which he spent his teenage and young years. Growing up, he developed a special love for football. In 1933 he began his studies at the University in Algiers, where he studied philosophy.
In 1935 he joined the French Communist Party, although he was not a Marxist. He believed that by joining the party he had the possibility to fight for the elimination of inequalities between the Europeans and the natives of Algeria. After all, he himself lived bearing the stigma of a man who grew up in Algeria. Realizing that he didn’t really belong in that party, he left a year later.
In 1938 he started working for the leftist newspaper Alger républicain. When the paper closed in 1940, he moved to Paris, where he took a job as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Paris-Soir. During the German occupation of Paris, Camus published two of his most important works, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, where he developed many of his philosophical ideas. The “cycle of the absurd”, as he classified his work, was completed in the following years by the plays The Misunderstanding and Caligula. His associations with people of the French resistance definitely influenced his thinking. Befriended Sartre and became part of a circle of left-wing intellectuals that also included Simone de Beauvais and André Breton.
In 1947, Panoukla was published and very quickly became widespread. Camus’s name began to become known around the world, which gave him his first nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 after a proposal by Hjalmar Gullberg. Just two years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Camus was killed in a car accident. Publisher Michel Gallimard drove a striking black Facel-Vega with Camus as his co-driver. Suddenly, possibly due to the ice on the road, he lost control of the car, which hit a tree at high speed, resulting in the death of the two occupants. The diary read January 4, 1960. Ironically, Camus had previously argued that there is nothing more absurd in the world than losing one’s life in a car accident.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
