Camus at His Sources

Albert Camus has always had a special appeal for American readers. The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel have been sowing moral and intellectual provocation on this side of the Atlantic for more than twenty years. No American writer of our time, in fact, has had so profound an effect on the last several generations of American students as this French Algerian. His political and philosophical essays are prized for their illumination of man’s struggle for a viable ethic on the level of the human condition alone. His novels are savored as allegories embodying contemporary moral and philosophical dilemmas. Such was their author’s ambition. Camus was not a subscriber to realism in art, nor was he primarily interested in exploring individual psyches, least of all his own. If this has led some readers to mistake his novels for riddles compounded by means of cold philosophical formulas divorced from real life, many of these essays will come as a happy surprise.

For the great revelation of these writings, most of them never before translated, is precisely that Camus does at last speak of himself, disclose himself, in some of the most stirring, most beautiful and unforgettable pages he ever wrote. Without intruding on his private life, the essays, which span his entire career, reveal a good deal about the private man and his relation to his art.