Albert Camus

Independent activity Marxism–Leninism 1913–1960 ✕ Car crash

Algerian-born writer who took up Nietzsche's question of nihilism through the absurd of The Myth of Sisyphus and the revolt of The Rebel

Born to a poor pied-noir family in French Algeria, he studied philosophy at the University of Algiers and was deeply impressed by Greek philosophy and Nietzsche. He joined the Communist Party in 1935 and was expelled from the Algerian Communist Party in 1937. The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) portrayed the absurd, the gap between a world that gives no meaning and humans who seek it, and under the occupation he edited the Resistance paper Combat. In The Rebel (1951) he examined modern revolt and revolution, Nietzsche's included, attacked totalitarian communism and defended a libertarian socialism close to anarcho-syndicalism, which brought his break with Sartre. He rejected the label of existentialist, won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died in a car crash in 1960.