Albert Camus: A Life

Based on Albert Camus's personal correspondence, previously unpublished recordings, and interviews with the writer's family, friends, and lovers, Olivier Todd reveals in Albert Camus: A Lifetime the complexity of a writer who was charming and virulent, sincere and theatrical, arrogant and insecure.

On January 4, 1960, returning to Paris after a holiday, Albert Camus died in a car accident. "A stupid death," as he often said of fatalities in car accidents. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 at the age of 43, Camus was a hero of the Resistance, a defender of the Muslim Arabs of his native Algeria, a communist who fought against Stalinism, and one of the foremost leaders of his generation of writers, with a work built around absurdity and revolt.

Born in 1913 on a farm near Mondovi, Algeria, Camus could not have had a more proletarian background. During his youth, he joined the Communist Party. Finding journalism his "higher profession," Camus began writing for the liberal periodical Alger Républicain, while also producing pieces for the Algerian cultural center. It was these political campaigns to denounce the misery of Muslims that forced him to abandon his native country, where he could no longer find work, and to go into exile in 1940 in Paris, where he produced his major works.

In France, in addition to publishing his acclaimed novels The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger , Camus became close to Sartre, and the two, along with Simone de Beauvoir, became inseparable. A contributor and promoter of the underground newspaper Combat , a landmark in the history of the French press, Camus established himself as a celebrity in Paris at the end of World War II: a best-selling novelist, philosopher, editor of a major newspaper, and a controversial figure who refused the Legion of Honor and an invitation to join the Académie Française. In 1951, estranged from the Communist Party and at odds with Sartre and French left-wing intellectuals, he published The Rebel , and five years later, The Fall , with which he revealed signs of disillusionment, isolation, and loneliness.

Based on Camus's personal correspondence, previously unpublished recordings, and interviews with his family, friends, and lovers, Olivier Todd reveals the full complexity of a writer who was charming and virulent, sincere and theatrical, arrogant and insecure. The biographer contrasts Camus's life with historical moments, such as the French occupation of North Africa, and the atmosphere of postwar literary Paris. He assesses Camus's success and his turbulent private life, which included a compulsive attraction to women, his struggle with debilitating tuberculosis, and the intellectual polemics he engaged in in defense of his political positions.

“Olivier Todd's monumental biography is an even-handed but powerful defense of Camus's political and human reputation.” – The Sunday Times

“One of the merits of Olivier Todd's book is to clarify how close an author can be to his work, even in everyday life, to such an extent that Camus's famous sincerity seems frightening to us today.” – Lire