Albert Camus

Camus grew up poor in French Algeria, was raised by a deaf mother and an illiterate grandmother, won the Nobel Prize in Literature at forty-four, and died in a car crash at forty-six with a return train ticket in his pocket.

His philosophical question is the one he says is the only serious one: given that life has no built-in meaning, why not commit suicide? His answer is absurdism: the absurd is the collision between our hunger for meaning and the universe's refusal to provide one. We cannot dissolve this collision, but we can live in it — defiantly, lucidly, refusing both suicide and the false comfort of religion or ideology. The myth of Sisyphus, eternally rolling his stone uphill, becomes the human condition; the dignity is in the rolling.

He broke publicly with Sartre over the question of revolutionary violence in the 1950s — Camus refused to justify Stalinist atrocities as historical necessity. The break ended their friendship and earned Camus an isolation he never fully recovered from. His novel The Plague may be the most-read philosophical novel of the 20th century.