Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
The Stranger, also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella written by French author Albert Camus. The first of Camus' novels published in his lifetime, the story follows Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who, weeks after his mother's funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and after the killing.
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize.
Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value.
Octave Mirbeau was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
François Cheng is a Chinese-born French academician, writer, poet, and calligrapher. He is the author of essays, novels, collections of poetry and books on art written in the French language, and the translator of some of the great French poets into Chinese.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on 25 March 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No. 32. He was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet.
"The Guest" is a short story by the French writer Albert Camus. It was first published in 1957 as part of a collection entitled Exile and the Kingdom. The French title "L'Hôte" translates into both "the guest" and "the host" which ties back to the relationship between the main characters of the story. Camus employs this short tale to reflect upon issues raised by the political situation in French North Africa. In particular, he explores the problem of refusing to take sides in the colonial conflict in Algeria, something that mirrors Camus' own non-aligned stance which he had set out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
André Pousse was a noted French actor and, in his youth, also a notable cyclist.
Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières was a French architect and theoretician. He was born and died in Paris. He published several works on architectural and related subjects, including Architecture of Expression, and The Theatre of Desire at the End of the Ancien Régime; Or, The Analogy of Fiction with Architectural Innovation.
Pascal Pia, born Pierre Durand, was a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar. He also used the pseudonyms Pascal Rose, Pascal Fely and others.
Fouad Laroui is a Moroccan economist and writer, born in Oujda, Morocco. After his studies at the Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca), he joined the prestigious École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, where he studied engineering. After working shortly for the Office Cherifien des Phosphates company in Khouribga (Morocco), he moved to the United Kingdom where he spent several years in Cambridge and York. Later he obtained a PhD in economics and moved to Amsterdam where he started his career as a writer. He has published about twenty books between novels, collections of short stories and essays and two collections of poetry in Dutch. He has won several literary prizes, amongst which the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, the Prix Jean-Giono and the Grande Médaille de la littérature de l'Académie française.
"The Renegade" is a short story written in 1957. It is the second short story published in the volume Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus.
"The Silent Men" is a short story written in 1957. It is the third short story published in the volume Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus.
"The Artist at Work" is a short story by the French writer Albert Camus from Exile and the Kingdom. It has been described as "a satirical commentary on Camus’ personal experience among the Paris intellectual elite of the 1940s and 1950s". The story addresses the question of one's relationship to the community, or more fundamentally the whole issue of existence. The epigraph, a verse from the Book of Jonah, and the name of the main character, "Jonas", set up a link to the prophet Jonah's interaction with people of the Bible.
The Misunderstanding, sometimes published as Cross Purpose, is a play written in 1943 in occupied France by Albert Camus. It focuses on Camus’ idea of The Absurd.
"The Growing Stone" is a short story by the French writer Albert Camus. It is the final short story in the collection Exile and the Kingdom.
Roger Grenier was a French writer, journalist and radio animator. He was Regent of the Collège de ’Pataphysique.
The 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times." He is the ninth French author to become a recipient of the prize after Catholic novelist François Mauriac in 1952, and the fourth philosopher after British analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1950.
Justin O'Brien was an American biographer, translator of André Gide and Albert Camus and professor of French at Columbia University.
