Aronson, Ronald. "Albert Camus." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY OCtober 27, 2011.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a journalist, editor and editorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of short stories, political essayist and activist—and arguably, although he came to deny it, a philosopher. He ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century's best-known existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”(MS, 3). And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top. Camus's philosophy found political expression in The Rebel, which along with his newspaper editorials, political essays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a great moralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of the Cold-War era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leading intellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left. Furthermore, in posing and answering urgent philosophical questions of the day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of the Enlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in a car accident in January, 1960, at the age of 46.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/

Herbeck, Jason. Review of John Foley's ALBERT CAMUS. NDPR (August 2009).

Foley, John. Albert Camus: from the Absurd to Revolt. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2008. John Foley's book addresses what for all intents and purposes he perceives as the all-too-often misunderstood relationship between the absurd and revolt in Camus's writings. Calling into question the critical contention made most recently by Avi Sagi and Richard Kamber, according to which Camus eventually rejected the absurd in favor of revolt, Foley proposes to demonstrate the "intellectual continuum" linking the two (4). Moreover, recognizing what he terms the "profound coherence between these two concepts" will, Foley argues, allow us to better negotiate the nuances of Camus's political and philosophical engagements (170). Such a perspective is meant to afford readers a more informed understanding of the vexed issues, such as capital punishment, Algerian independence and the legitimacy of political violence, that Camus faced in his lifetime. Consequently, where Camus's detractors (ranging from Sartre and de Beauvoir to Conor Cruise O'Brien and Edward Said) have leveled charges of political quietism and inconsequence, bourgeois liberalism and impotent idealism, Foley's close critical readings and extensive scholarship provide an apologia of sorts for what some have too hastily interpreted as Camus's egregious contradictions and inexcusable silence. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17107.

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Review of David Sherman's CAMUS. NDPR (April 2009).

Sherman, David. Camus. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009.

The last section of the chapter before the "Epilogue" of David Sherman's Camus is titled "Rebirth", an appropriate title for many reasons. First, because the section is devoted to an examination of Albert Camus' last (in fact posthumously published) work, The First Man, a largely autobiographical text which relates the birth and upbringing of the narrator as well as the experience of the pieds-noirs, the European settlers who established themselves in Algeria after 1848, looking for a new life in what became home for them and their descendants. Second, this text was the unfinished manuscript that Camus was carrying with him when his life met its end in a fatal car crash on January 4, 1960. It is difficult not to see in the posthumous publication of the work found on the very site of the crash some form of rebirth of its author, especially because the book turned out to be an important factor in changing the perception many had of Camus as an intellectual who failed to support the Algerian nationalists fighting for their independence. Another Camus scholar, David Carroll, states that The First Man changed his perception of Camus' position on the Algerian war as it did for many others (Albert Camus the Algerian, Columbia UP, 2007). So, indeed, the publication of The First Man does mark a rebirth for its author at a time when the collapse of ideological certitudes means that Camus is no longer persona non grata and can be read afresh as "a philosopher of our times after all" to quote the last words of Sherman's book.

In 1994, the year The First Man was published, five years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, the intellectual world was ready for Albert Camus' rebirth and also ready to reread his work. He had been ostracized and ignored by the intelligentsia on the Left following the publication in 1955 of The Rebel (without being any more palatable to the Right). In the 1980's, the discredit into which Communism had fallen had led to some reconsideration of The Rebel's ethical posture which endorsed neither Capitalism nor Communism. David Sherman rightly states that "in the 1990's a renewed commitment to such cosmopolitan ethico-political concerns as dialogue and human rights" could not but bring back Albert Camus as "a man for our times" since those constitute, ultimately, what he championed as an intellectual and a writer all his life. In 1996 Olivier Todd's monumental biography, Albert Camus, une vie (Gallimard), translated into English the following year (Albert Camus: a Life, Alfred A. Knopf), was another milestone in this comeback. David Sherman's Camus in the Blackwell Great Minds series is certainly a sign that now Albert Camus has found the place he deserves among Western thinkers whose voice our times must hear.

Sherman's book provides an excellent account of Camus' fortunes and misfortunes in the intellectual realm in France immediately following the war. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15847.