Albert Camus

Born: 7 November 1913 Dréan, El Taref, French Algeria

Died: 4 January 1960 Villeblevin, Yonne, Burgundy, France

Biography: Albert Camus  was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. Camus´s first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd. He saw it as the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as The Stranger and The Plague.  During the war Camus joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. This group worked against the Nazis and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre Beauchard. Camus became the paper´s editor in 1943. When the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944, Camus witnessed and reported the last of the fighting. Soon after the event on 6 August 1945, he was one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition and disgust to the United States´ dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times", for his writings against capital punishment in the essay "Réflexions sur la Guillotine" (Reflections on the Guillotine). Camus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher´s proposal to travel with him. He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling.