Exile and the Kingdom

These six stories, written at the height of Camus' artistic powers, all depict people at decisive, revelatory moments in their lives. Translated by Justin O'Brien.

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs—in a weather bureau, in an automobile supply firm, in a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He went on to become a journalist, and from 1935 to 1938 he ran the Theatre de l'Equipe, a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, Dostoyevsky, and others. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of Combat, then an important underground newspaper. His fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom; his philosophical essays, "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Rebel"; and his plays have assured his preeminent position in modern letters. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.

Carol Cosman has translated works by Balzac and Simone de Beauvoir from the French as well as JeanPaul Sartre's biography of Flaubert.