Albert Camus

Camus grew up poor in colonial Algeria, raised by an illiterate, half-deaf mother after his father died in the first weeks of the First World War. Tuberculosis at seventeen ended both his football career and any illusion of unlimited time; he took to journalism instead, and during the Nazi occupation edited the underground Resistance paper Combat.

The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, both 1942, launched his philosophy of the absurd; The Plague (1947) allegorized the occupation as epidemic. A public rupture with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952, over Camus's refusal to excuse Soviet terror, split French intellectual life for years. He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 at forty-four, one of its youngest recipients, and died three years later in a car crash: a return train ticket, unused, found in his pocket.