Avinoam sapir biography of albert camus

Albert Camus became known for his political journalism, novels and essays during the s. His best-known works, including The Stranger and The Plague , are exemplars of absurdism. Camus was born on November 7, , in Mondavi, French Algeria. His pied-noir family had little money. Camus' 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.

Camus, Albert, The Myth

Camus did well in school and was admitted to the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy and played goalie for the soccer team. He quit the team following a bout of tuberculosis in , thereafter focusing on academic study. By , he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. Camus became political during his student years, joining first the Communist Party and then the Algerian People's Party.

As a champion of individual rights, he opposed French colonization and argued for the empowerment of Algerians in politics and labor. Camus would later be associated with the French anarchist movement. Like Sartre, Camus wrote and published political commentary on the conflict throughout its duration. In , he was one of the few Allied journalists to condemn the American use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

He was also an outspoken critic of communist theory, eventually leading to a rift with Sartre. The dominant philosophical contribution of Camus' work is absurdism.