
Albert Camus was a French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and playwright who developed the philosophy of the Absurd — the confrontation between the human need for meaning and the world's radical indifference to that need. His essay The Myth of Sisyphus argued that authentic existence requires neither suicide nor the leap of faith to religion, but defiant, lucid rebellion in the face of absurdity. His novels The Stranger and The Plague dramatised this philosophy with a spare, luminous prose that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
