Albert Camus Essay

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Life of Albert Camus: Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, into a family where his parents were proletariats. His father was an itinerant agricultural laborer who died in 1914 from his wounds in the Battle of Marne. Camus’s mother was an illiterate factory worker who was partially deaf from a stroke that impaired her speech forever. Camus had a strong devotion towards his mother. Camus was a French novelist, essayist and playwright, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature. Camus was closely linked to his fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, but he broke with him over Sartre's support to Stalinist politics. Camus died at the age of forty-six in a car accident near Sens, France. Among his best-known novels are The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947). He also joined the Communist Party, but his interest in the works of Marx and Engels was rather shallow. He would mix with more significant writers like André Malraux and André Gide. Camus suffered from tuberculosis all his life. In 1923 Camus won a scholarship to the lycée in Algiers, where he studied from 1924 to 1932. He later received a diploma in Philosophy from the University of Algiers. Camus's first book, L'envers Et L'endroit (1937), was a collection of essays, which he wrote at the age of twenty-two. His second novel, L'etranger (The Outsider), which he had begun in Algeria before the war, appeared in 1942. It has been considered one of the greatest of all hard-boiled novels. He died in a car accident on January 4, 1960. Summary of The Outsider: The protagonist of The Outsider is, Mersault, an ill-fated character. There are two deaths, his mother's and his own. Mersault is a clerk, who seems to have no feelings and spends afternoons in lovemaking and empty nights in the cinema. He shares a similarity with Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, a character from Crime and

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