00:28The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957 was awarded to Albert Camus for his important literary production,
00:36which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.
00:43Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, French Algeria.
00:49His Pierre Noir family had little money.
00:52Camus' father died in combat during World War I, after which Camus lived with his mother, who was partially deaf, in a low-income section of Algiers.
01:03Camus did well in school and was admitted to the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy and played goalie for the soccer team.
01:12He quit the team following a bout of tuberculosis in 1930, thereafter focusing on academic study.
01:22By 1936, he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy.
01:29Camus became political during his student years, joining first the Communist Party and then the Algerian People's Party.
01:37As a champion of individual rights, he opposed French colonization and argued for the empowerment of Algerians in politics and labor.
01:47Camus would later be associated with the French anarchist movement.
01:52At the beginning of World War II, Camus joined the French resistance in order to help liberate Paris from the Nazi occupation.
02:03He met Jean-Paul Sartre during his period of military service.
02:09Like Sartre, Camus wrote and published political commentary on the conflict throughout its duration.
02:17In 1945, he was one of the few allied journalists to condemn the American use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
02:26He was also an outspoken critic of communist theory, eventually leading to a rift with Sartre.
02:34The dominant philosophical contribution of Camus' work is absurdism.
02:39While he is often associated with existentialism, he rejected the label,
02:44expressing surprise that he would be viewed as philosophical ally of Sartre.
02:50Elements of absurdism and existentialism are present in Camus' most celebrated writing.
02:57The myth of Sisyphus elucidates his theory of the absurd most directly.
03:05The protagonists of The Stranger and The Plague must also confront the absurdity of social and cultural orthodoxies with dire results.
03:20As an Algerian, Camus brought afresh outsider perspective to French literature of the period,
03:26related to but distinct from the metropolitan literature of Paris.
03:31In addition to novels, he wrote and adapted plays, and was active in the theatre during the 1940s and 50s.
03:41As novelist and playwright, moralist and political theorist, Albert Camus, after World War II, became the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next,
03:53not only in France, but also in Europe and eventually the world.
03:57His writings, which addressed themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien universe,
04:04the estrangement of the individual from himself, the problem of evil, and the pressing finality of death,
04:12accurately reflected the alienation and disillusionment of the post-war intellectual.
04:18He is remembered with Sartre as a leading practitioner of the existential novel.
04:24Though he understood the nihilism of many of his contemporaries, Camus also argued the necessity of defending such values as truth, moderation and justice.
04:35In his last works, he sketched the outlines of a liberal humanism that rejected the dogmatic aspects of both Christianity and Marxism.
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