Albert Camus Essays

After his father’s death, Camus, his mother, and his older brother moved to Algiers where they lived with his maternal uncle and grandmother in her cramped second-floor apartment in the working-class district of Belcourt.Camus’s mother Catherine, who was illiterate, partially deaf, and afflicted with a speech pathology, worked in an ammunition factory and cleaned homes to help support the family.

The name change signaled a new emphasis on classic drama and avant-garde aesthetics and a shift away from labor politics and agitprop.

In 1938 he joined the staff of a new daily newspaper, the , where his assignments as a reporter and reviewer covered everything from contemporary European literature to local political trials.

He is often described as an existentialist writer, though he himself disavowed the label.

He began his literary career as a political journalist and as an actor, director, and playwright in his native Algeria.

He also enjoyed sports, especially soccer, of which he once wrote (recalling his early experience as a goal-keeper): “I learned . That helped me in later life, especially in mainland France, where nobody plays straight.” It was also during this period that Camus suffered his first serious attack of tuberculosis, a disease that was to afflict him, on and off, throughout his career.

By the time he finished his Baccalauréat degree in June 1932, Camus was already contributing articles to , a literary monthly, and looking forward to a career in journalism, the arts, or higher education.That same year Camus also earned his degree and completed his dissertation, a study of the influence of Plotinus and neo-Platonism on the thought and writings of St. Over the next three years Camus further established himself as an emerging author, journalist, and theatre professional.After his disillusionment with and eventual expulsion from the Communist Party, he reorganized his dramatic company and renamed it the Théâtre de l’Equipe (literally the Theater of the Team).In his posthumously published autobiographical novel , Camus recalls this period of his life with a mixture of pain and affection as he describes conditions of harsh poverty (the three-room apartment had no bathroom, no electricity, and no running water) relieved by hunting trips, family outings, childhood games, and scenic flashes of sun, seashore, mountain, and desert.Camus attended elementary school at the local Ecole Communale, and it was there that he encountered the first in a series of teacher-mentors who recognized and nurtured the young boy’s lively intelligence.Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate.Though he was neither by advanced training nor profession a philosopher, he nevertheless made important, forceful contributions to a wide range of issues in moral philosophy in his novels, reviews, articles, essays, and speeches—from terrorism and political violence to suicide and the death penalty.Later, while living in occupied France during WWII, he became active in the Resistance and from 1944-47 served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper ), he had achieved an international reputation and readership.It was in these works that he introduced and developed the twin philosophical ideas—the concept of the Absurd and the notion of Revolt—that made him famous.It was during this period that he also published his first two literary works—, a series of lyrical celebrations interspersed with political and philosophical reflections on North Africa and the Mediterranean.The 1940s witnessed Camus’s gradual ascendance to the rank of world-class literary intellectual.