Albert Camus

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.39 BST

1913-1960

"A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. "

Birthplace

Mondovi, Algeria

Education

Algiers University (philosophy)

Other jobs

Supported himself through college working in a car firm and shipping company; political journalist; active in French Resistance.

Did you know?

Goalkeeper for Algeria, Camus found the missing link between football and existentialism ("All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football").

Critical verdict

Combining literary clarity with admirable political and philosophical commitment, Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".

Recommended works

The Outsider is a compelling, dreamlike fable; The Myth of Sisyphus a brave attempt to reconcile man with himself.

Influences

He produced stage adaptations of Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1956) and Dostoevsky's The Possessed (1959).

Now read on

The Plague is part of the great tradition of apocalypse novels: try JG Ballard's The Drowned World or Mary Shelley's The Last Man for similar studies of isolation become absolute. Herman Hesse's Siddharta achieves a location of meaning in meaninglessness comparable to The Myth of Sisyphus.