Albert Camus, b. Mondovi, Algeria, Nov. 7, 1913, earned a worldwide reputation as a novelist and essayist and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. Through his writings, and in some measure against his will, he became the leading moral voice of his generation during the 1950s. At the height of his fame, Camus died in an automobile accident near Sens, France, on Jan. 4, 1960.Although born in extreme poverty, Camus attended the lycee and university in Algiers, where he developed an abiding interest in sports and the theater. His university career was cut short by a severe attack of tuberculosis, an illness from which he suffered periodically throughout his life. The themes of poverty, sport, and the horror of human mortality all figure prominently in his volumes of so-called Algerian essays: L'Envers et l'endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side, 1937), Noces (Nuptials, 1938), and L'Ete (Summer, 1954). In 1938 he became a journalist with Alger-Republicain, an anticolonialist newspaper. While working for this daily he wrote detailed reports on the condition of poor Arabs in the Kabyles region. These reports were later published in abridged form in Actuelles III (1958).
