the question of suicide and concludes with a daring argument that finds in the legend of Sisyphus a strangely comforting allegory of the human condition. Sisyphus, who becomes in Camus’s hands an exemplary existentialist, spent his days in the endlessly futile task of pushing a boulder to the top of a hill from which it always rolled down again. Every human life is expended as meaninglessly as that of Sisyphus, Camus argues, yet one must conceive of Sisyphus as happy, because he was totally absorbed by his assigned task and found sufficient satisfaction in its daily accomplishment, without requiring that it also have some enduring significance. There are close links between such reasoning and the ideas that informThe Stranger, but it is erroneous to argue, as some have, that The Myth of Sisyphus is an “explanation” of The Stranger. The former work is, rather, a discussion of similar themes in a different form and from a different perspective, in accordance with Camus’s unique way of working as a writer.

That unique way of working produced another long philosophical essay, L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel, 1956), which has affinities with the novel The Plague as well as with four of Camus’s plays written and produced in the 1940’s: Caligula (pb. 1944; English translation, 1948); Le Malentendu (pr., pb. 1944; The Misunderstanding, 1948); L’État de siège (pr., pb. 1948; State of Siege, 1958), and Les Justes (pr. 1949; The Just Assassins, 1958). Each of these plays is also related by certain thematic elements to the two novels that Camus published in the same period.

Camus’s earliest political journalism, written before 1940 and dealing with the problems of his native Algeria, attracted little attention, but his work for the underground newspaper Combat during and after World War II achieved considerable celebrity, and the best articles he wrote for Combat were later collected in a volume that was widely read and admired. During the civil war in Algeria, in the 1950’s, Camus again entered the lists as a political journalist, and because he was by then indisputably Algeria’s most famous man of letters, his articles were of major importance at the time, though highly controversial and much less widely approved than the wartime pieces from Combat.

Camus produced only one collection of short stories, L’Exil et le royaume (1957; Exile and the Kingdom, 1958), composed during the same years as the novel The Fall, but those stories have been very popular and are regarded by many as among the finest short stories published in France in the twentieth century. The volume is particularly noteworthy because it offers the only examples Camus ever published of fiction composed in the third-person mode of the omniscient narrator. The first three of his published novels are variations of the limited-perspective first-person narrative.

Deeply involved in the theater throughout his career, both as writer and director, Camus adapted for the French stage the work of foreign novelists Fyodor Dostoevski and William Faulkner, and of playwrights of Spain’s Golden Age, including Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega Carpio. These adaptations have all been published and form part of Camus’s contribution to the theater.

To the immediate postwar public, not only in France but also throughout Europe, Albert Camus seemed a writer of unassailable stature. Although Camus himself repudiated the designation, he was regarded worldwide as one of the two principal exponents of existentialism (the other was Jean-Paul Sartre), the single most influential philosophical movement of the twentieth century. Indeed, the existentialist worldview—according to which the individual human being “must assume ultimate responsibility for his acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad”—has profoundly shaped the values of countless people who have never read Camus or Sartre.

In the 1950’s, Camus was widely admired not only as a writer but also as a hero of the war against fascism, a spokesman for the younger generation, and a guardian of the moral conscience of Europe. That reputation was consecrated in 1957 with the award to Camus of the Nobel Prize in Literature, at the remarkably young age of forty-four. Yet, as has happened to many other recipients of the Nobel Prize, the award seemed almost a signal of the rapid deflation of his renown. Camus suddenly came under severe criticism for his stand on the Algerian Civil War, was attacked as self-righteous and artistically sterile, and was finally denounced as irrelevant by the new literary generation then coming to prominence, who were weary of moral issues and more concerned with aesthetic questions of form and language. Camus’s fame and influence appeared to many to have suffered an irreversible decline by the end of the decade, at least in France. (In the United States, the case was different: Made more accessible by the “paperback revolution,” Camus’s works were enormously influential among American college students in the 1960’s.) There were those who suggested that the automobile accident that took his life in January of 1960 was a disguised blessing, sparing him the pain of having to witness the collapse of his career.

It is true that, in the late twentieth century, generations after the height of Camus’s fame, French writers and intellectuals showed no influence of Camus in their writings and scant critical interest in his works. Still, his works have enjoyed steady sales among the French public, and outside France, especially in the United States, interest in Camus has remained strong. There has been an inevitable sifting of values, a crystallization of what it is, in Camus’s work, that still has the power to survive and what no longer speaks to successive generations. It has become clear, for example, that his philosophical essays are too closely tied to the special circumstances that occasioned them; in spite of a few brilliant passages, those essays now seem rambling and poorly argued as well as irrelevant to the concerns of modern readers. Camus’s works for the theater, too, have held up poorly, being too abstract and inhuman to engage the emotions of audiences. Although his plays have continued to be performed on both sides of the Atlantic, interest in them has steadily declined over the years. It is his fiction that still seems most alive, both in characters and ideas, and that still presents to the reader endlessly fascinating enigmas that delight the imagination and invite repeated readings.

Although the total number of Camus’s fictional works is small, those works are, in both form and content, among the most brilliantly original contributions to the art of fiction produced anywhere in the twentieth century. In particular, Camus expressed through fiction, more powerfully and more memorably than anyone else in his time, the painful moral and spiritual dilemmas of modern man: evil, alienation, meaninglessness, and death. He invented techniques and created characters by which he was able to make manifest, in unforgettable terms, the eternal struggle of Everyman for some shred of dignity and happiness. His stories have accordingly taken on some of the haunting quality, and the prestige, of myths. For that reason, it seems safe to predict that it is his fiction that represents Camus’s greatest achievement—an achievement that will endure long after his philosophical musings and political arguments have been forgotten.

Is it accurate or useful to consider the work of Albert Camus “existentialist”?

How are Camus’s Algerian origins reflected in his fiction?

Why is Meursault executed in The Stranger?

Why does Camus not reveal the identity of the narrator of The Plague until the novel’s conclusion?

What is the significance of the title The Fall?

How does The Myth of Sisyphus help explicate some of Camus’s fiction?

What is going to happen to Daru after the final words of “The Guest”?

How does Camus treat the theme of capital punishment?

How does a tension between solidarity and solitude shape Camus’s work?