Camus, Albert (1913–60)

Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for having ‘illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times’. By mythologizing the experiences of a secular age struggling with an increasingly contested religious tradition, he dramatized the human effort to ‘live and create without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe’(1943). Thus the challenge posed by ‘the absurd’ with which he is so universally identified.