Albert Camus

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was born in Algeria to French parents. After his father died in World War I, when Albert was still an infant, the family was reduced to impoverished circumstances, forced to move in with relatives in an apartment without electricity or running water. From these humble beginnings, Camus became one of the most famous and celebrated writers in the world, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at the improbably young age of 44. In this episode of the History of Literature, we look at his works, including The Stranger and The Plague; his entanglement with the existentialists (a label he rejected); the analysis of his works by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the three possible philosophical responses to humanity's essentially absurd condition. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. (We appreciate it!) Find out more at historyofliterature.com, jackewilson.com, or by following Jacke and Mike on Twitter at @thejackewilson and @literatureSC. Or send an email to [email protected]. Music Credits: “Parisian” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello. He was born on the eve of a pointless and devastating war, World War I to French parents living in Algiers.
0:18.0	His father, a military veteran in Wineshipping clerk, was recalled to that war and died before his youngest son
0:24.4	turned one. Albert Camu never knew his father. In fact, he only knew two things about
0:30.2	him and one of them was wrong. He believed his father had been a first-generation
0:34.2	Amagre to Algeria after starting life as an ulcation. In fact, it was his great-grandfather who
0:40.9	had first moved the family to Africa and he had come from Bordeaux.
0:45.8	The other salient fact that Camu heard was that his father witnessed a public execution which
0:51.3	so revolts him he became physically ill.
0:54.9	The story, brief as it was, turned out to be formative.
0:58.6	Kemo returned to it when writing his novel, The Stranger, and the themes it brought with it a questioning of justice, of the meaning
1:05.7	of guilt, of man's treatment of fellow man. Those were themes in Camus' mind for the rest of his
1:11.6	life until his tragic death in a car accident at the age of 46.
1:16.8	An accident that some believed and some still say was orchestrated by the KGB.
1:27.0	Kimu was the second youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Having won it two years before his death at the age of 44,
1:30.0	only Rudyard Kipling who won wanted at age 42 was younger.
1:35.0	Kimu accepted the prize with humility feeling that he had a great life stretched out before him,
1:40.0	that he was in mid-career, that turned out not to be so. In this great shining light of mid-20th century
1:47.1	France, this philosopher with movie star looks, this writer, that's how he viewed himself as a writer, became an example of his own absurdist
1:57.2	worldview. What is the point of a meaningless and tragic world? He was perhaps the most famous existentialist novelist in the world
2:04.9	with only Jean-Paul Sartre as a contender for that distinction and yet
2:09.4	Albert Camus rejected that label. He wasn't an existentialist, he said.
	...

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