Albert Camus: A LifeDrawing on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers, here is the enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of the Nobel Prize winning author. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts—between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus—his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism, and his attraction to the theater and to journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's measure as a successful novelist, journalist, playwright and director, literary editor, philosopher, he also reveals the temperament in the writer that increasingly isolated him and crippled his reputation in the years before his death and for a long time after. He shows us the solitary man behind the mask—debilitated by continuing bouts of tuberculosis, constantly drawn to irresistible women, and deeply troubled by his political conflicts with the reigning French intellectuals, particularly by the vitriol of his former friend Sartre over the Algerian conflict. Filled with sharp observations and sparkling with telling details, here is a wonderfully human portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died at the age of forty-six and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time. |
Contents
Chapter Five White Socks | |
Chapter Six Little Bits of Soul | |
Chapter Twentyseven 180000 Copies | |
Chapter Twentyeight Combats | |
Chapter Twentynine The Ramberts | |
Chapter Thirty The Island with Three Rivers | |
Chapter Thirtyone The Terror | |
Chapter Thirtytwo Bitterness | |
Chapter Thirtythree Dear Comrade | |
Chapter Thirtyfour The Unique One | |
Chapter Seven The Temptation to Action | |
Chapter Eight Heroism and A Load of Crap | |
Chapter Nine Saint Augustine Without Marx | |
Chapter Ten The Letter from Salzburg | |
Chapter Eleven Banned Playwright | |
Chapter Twelve The Political Agitator | |
Chapter Thirteen Intellectual Worker | |
Chapter Fourteen An Older Brother | |
Chapter Fifteen Battles | |
Chapter Sixteen The Reading Room | |
Chapter Seventeen Persistent Hopes for Peace | |
Chapter Eighteen A Beach at Bouisseville | |
Chapter Nineteen Exile | |
Chapter Twenty Exodus | |
Chapter Twentyone Stopover at Oran | |
Chapter Twentytwo An Important Thing | |
Chapter Twentythree Which Absurdity? | |
Chapter Twentyfour Short of Breath | |
Chapter Twentyfive Mans Prejudices | |
Chapter Twentysix Resistances | |
Chapter Thirtyfive Three Friends | |
Chapter Thirtysix Forty Grams of Streptomycin | |
Chapter Thirtyseven 5 rue SébastienBottin Facing the Garden | |
Chapter Thirtyeight On the Courtyard Side | |
Chapter Thirtynine Rebellions | |
Chapter Forty In a Glass Bowl | |
Chapter Fortyone November 1 1954 | |
Chapter Fortytwo Algeria Is Not France | |
Chapter Fortythree The Prisoners Shout | |
Chapter Fortyfour A BlackHearted Anemone | |
Chapter Fortyfive The Ways of Silence | |
Chapter Fortysix The Prize to Pay | |
Chapter Fortyseven Algerian Griefs | |
Chapter Fortyeight I Dont Know How to Repeat Myself | |
Chapter Fortynine Grandrue de lEglise | |
Conclusion | |
NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR | |
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Common terms and phrases
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