Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, playwright and journalist, born in Dréan, French Algeria, to a poor working-class family; his father died before he turned one, and his mother — partially deaf and nearly illiterate — and grandmother raised him in a home with almost no books. He settled in France in 1940 and joined the Resistance in 1943, editing its underground paper Combat under a pseudonym. He won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, the youngest French writer to receive it. He died in a car crash in 1960. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary).
Camus rejected the label existentialist, preferring philosophy of the absurd: the clash between the human longing for meaning and a silent, indifferent universe. sartre-camus-thecollector (TheCollector, T4) reports the article's reading of this against nihilism — for Camus, the absence of meaning is a reason to go on living, not a reason to stop. His essay on the myth of Sisyphus argues that Sisyphus rises above his endless, pointless task by accepting it — "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." His key texts include The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel (L'Homme révolté, 1951), a book-length attack on revolutionary violence and the Soviet Gulag system: "Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic."
Camus and Sartre
sartre-camus-thecollector traces Camus's philosophical and political relationship with Sartre from friendship to public rupture. The two met in 1943, when Camus introduced himself at one of Sartre's plays; Sartre had already praised The Stranger in a review that year, and the two were close for years. They agreed on more than the later rift suggests: both were atheists who read atheism as the ground of radical freedom (Camus less combatively than Sartre), both held that a person exists through relations with others that can just as easily alienate as fulfil, and both meant their bleak-sounding philosophies as ultimately liberating.
They diverged sharply on politics and violence. Sartre was a Marxist who tried to fuse existentialism with Marxism through praxis — freedom becomes real, on his account, only when action changes material conditions, and he treated revolutionary violence as a necessary tool for liberating workers. Camus was a social reformist who favored non-violence, open dialogue and attention to the present over a utopian future, and he rejected revolutionary violence on the grounds that revolution breeds Terror.
The Rebel (1951) brought the disagreement into the open. A younger writer at Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes published a scathing review of it in 1952; Camus answered with a 17-page open letter addressed to "Monsieur le Directeur," pointedly avoiding Sartre's name, and Sartre replied with a 20-page letter of his own — opening "My dear Camus, our friendship was not an easy one, but I shall regret it" and going on to write "To be 'moral' in your sense is finally to be nothing" and "You are only half-alive." The public break ended the friendship. The Algerian War (from 1954) widened it further: Sartre backed the FLN's use of violence, while Camus — whose mother still lived in Algiers — opposed both French colonialism and Front de Libération Nationale terrorism, and called for a civilian truce instead. Sartre called Camus a coward; Camus called Sartre a "coffee house revolutionary." When Camus died in 1960, Sartre's eulogy praised his "stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual," and Sartre later said Camus remained the person he was always mentally arguing with.