You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest this week is my

colleague Adam Shatz, the LRV's US editor. His essay collection,

writers and missionaries, many of them from the LRB, was published last May, and his new biography of

Franz Fano, the Rebels Clinic, will be out in January 2024. January will also see the start of his new

LRB Close Reading's podcast series, Human Conditions,

and in that first episode, Judith Butler will be talking to Adam about the revolutionary thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. Today, however, Adam is talking to me about Sartre's one-time

friend, colleague, rival, Albert Camus, who Adam wrote about in a recent issue of the LRB.

The piece was a review of Travels in

the Americas, Camus Notes and Impressions of a New World, edited by Alice Kaplan and translated by

Ryan Bloom. So, hello, Adam, and thank you very much for joining me today. Good to talk to you, Tom.

So Camus is a writer and missionary of a kind, but perhaps an archetypal one, I don't know.

But the notebooks and diaries that you wrote about come from two trips that he made in the 1940s,

one to North America in 1946 and one to South America in 1949.

So he arrived in New York, as his right, in March, 1946 on the SS Oregon to promote,

or at least to mark the publication in English of his novel Letrangee, which is translated

as the outsider in the UK and the stranger in the US.

So how famous was Camus in the English-speaking world at that point?

Camus was a legend among New York intellectuals, but he wasn't well known to the public

because he hadn't yet been translated into English. I think that Le Tranger, the stranger or the

outsider, was published a week or so after his arrival in New York City. There was some knowledge of Camus as this

hero of the resistance, as a writer for the resistance publication, Comba. But as I said,

he was more of a legend than a known figure then. But he was, he was named to the FBI and to Jay Edgar Hoover.

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