November 7

French author and philosopher Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in French Algeria. Though often regarded as an existentialist, Camus’ works, including L’Étranger (1942) and La Peste (1947), are landmarks in absurdism, which holds that the efforts of human beings to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail because certainty is impossible in the face of the unknown. He argued that man must find his own clarity and meaning in a world that offers neither, and must endure his struggles in spite of their ultimate lack of significance. It is the individual who gives meaning to circumstance. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature for work which, “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times." He was killed in 1960 in an auto accident in France at age 46.