French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, born 100 years ago today in Algeria is probably best known for his novels The Stranger and The Plague. But as France marks his centennial, “it’s his politics, not his his philosophy, that still makes waves.” Winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957 and regarded as a giant of French literature, Smithsonian contributor Joshua Hammer, says it’s Camus’ “North African birthplace that permeated his thoughts and shaped his writing.” Like South Africa, French Algeria was a “very segregated society” and Camus “represents an Algeria of the pieds-noirs, the name given to the million-plus Europeans who lived there. He really didn’t know the Arab world.”Read the rest of this fascinating NPR article and check the EPL catalog for works by and about this author.
Laura