Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in the French colonial Algeria. His father was killed in 1914 at the battle of the Marne in World War I. Although his family was impoverished, Camus attended the university in Algiers. He paid for his education with odd jobs until a severe attack of tuberculosis forced him to drop out. His writing is greatly influenced by the poverty and illness of his youth. After dropping out, he eventually entered the world of political journalism. He wrote extensively about poverty in Algeria while working as a journalist for an anti-colonialist newspaper. During World War II, he went to Paris and joined the anti-German resistance movement.
             It was in wartime Paris that Camus developed his philosophy of the absurd--the assertion that life ultimately has no rational meaning. The Stranger, his first novel, deals with the hysteria provoked by Meursault's challenge to the accepted moral order. He does not cry at his mother's funeral, and he does not believe in God. He also kills a man he barely knows, "the Arab," without any real motive. He is tried and sentenced to death.
             "While the philosophy of Camus's fiction often tends to imply that no moral order actually has a rational basis, Camus himself did not act with moral indifference. Rather, his philosophy can best be characterized as a form of optimism without hope. In other words, Camus does not draw a direct correlation between the lack of hope and despair. The absurd hero is a hero because he achieves the ultimate rebellion--resisting the illusion of a rational order while also resisting despair. Camus continued to write prolifically about the nature of rebellion in the face of an absurd human condition. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1960" (Bree 21).
             His simple and clear style has made him a sort of Existentialist Hemingway. His simple short sentences are composed of only the e...