Albert Camus

Camus’s emphasis is on each individual’s recognition of his fate. Awareness and the choice to revolt are matters of personal consciousness and will; they are not particularly communal concerns. In fact, in Camus’s writings such as his novel The Stranger (1942), individual revolt is often set against the community and its norms. It is predicated upon one’s sense of exile from the world, an awareness of unmitigated existential solitude. Although Camus rejected suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, in his emphasis on personal autonomy he can be seen, ironically, as one of the intellectual fathers of the ethos of individualism that informs the current atmosphere regarding the “right” to suicide. --John F. Desmond, Walker Percy and Suicide, Modern Age, Winter 2005


Recommended reading:
by Albert Camus at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

Authors' Calendar, by Petri Liukkonen (2008)

Review by David Luhrssen of Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus, Shepherd-Express, April 26, 2007

Accidental Friends, review by Russell Jacoby of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, by Ronald Aronson, and Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, edited and translated by David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven, The Nation, March 18, 2004

Excerpt from pages 9-17 of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It by Ronald Aronson, University of Chicago Press (2004)

Master and Pupil, Seeing Things column by Robert Royal, Crisis, July/August 2003