On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris at the age of forty-seven. On the basis of his novel The Outsider (1942), his "philosophical prose-poem" The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), his plays, his Nobel Prize (1957), his political activism, and his Humphrey Bogart good looks, Camus was elevated to almost cult status in the middle decades of the century. This left him feeling as if sentenced to "the center of a glaring light," and in his Nobel speech he asked to be seen only as "a man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress ... FULL STORY »
