Books Written by Albert Camus

Camus published around 18 volumes during his lifetime: three novels, one collection of short stories, three volumes containing his four plays, two book-length philosophical essays, and nine further volumes of essays and collected journalism. Two more novels appeared after his death, A Happy Death in 1971 and The First Man in 1994, which is why most sources credit him with five novels rather than three. Totals range from about 15 to 20 depending on whether the political columns, the notebooks and his stage adaptations of other writers are counted.

His novels are The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956), and the posthumous A Happy Death (1971) and The First Man (1994). His major philosophical essays are The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951). He also published one short story collection, Exile and the Kingdom (1957), and four plays: Caligula, The Misunderstanding, State of Siege and The Just Assassins.

The Stranger. It is short, direct, and the clearest fictional statement of the absurd. Read The Myth of Sisyphus straight afterwards, because it makes the same argument with the reasoning left visible. Both were published in 1942 and were written as a pair.

He rejected the label. Camus described his position as absurdism, not existentialism, and he differed sharply from Sartre on whether human beings create their own meaning. His 1951 book The Rebel made the split public: Les Temps Modernes ran a hostile review by Francis Jeanson in 1952, Camus replied, Sartre answered him in print, and the two never spoke again.

Camus argued that the human demand for meaning and the universe's silence in response create a tension that cannot be resolved, which he called the absurd. Rather than escaping it through religious faith or suicide, he argued for living consciously inside it — a position he summarised in the closing line of The Myth of Sisyphus: one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The First Man. He was killed on 4 January 1960 when the car he was travelling in left the road at Villeblevin, about 17 kilometres from Sens; he was 46, and had meant to take the train. The unfinished manuscript was recovered from the mud beside the wreck. His daughter Catherine transcribed and edited it, and Gallimard published it in 1994, thirty-four years later.

For none of them individually. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957 was awarded “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times” — the body of work rather than a single book. He was 43 when it was announced in October 1957 and 44 at the ceremony that December, which is why sources give both ages. The Stranger and The Plague are the titles most often named as the ones that earned it.

There is none. They are the same novel, L'Étranger, published under different English titles: The Outsider in the United Kingdom and The Stranger in the United States, both in Stuart Gilbert's 1946 translation. Translations differ, though. Gilbert reads more formally than Matthew Ward's 1988 American version, which restores the flatness of Camus's French. Joseph Laredo (1982) and Sandra Smith (2012) are the current British texts.

Yes. Exile and the Kingdom, his only collection of short stories, appeared in 1957, the same year he received the Nobel Prize, and he published his stage adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed in 1959. He was working on The First Man when he died in 1960.

The Myth of Sisyphus if you want the argument underneath it, The Fall if you want another short novel in a single voice, or A Happy Death if you want to see the earlier draft The Stranger was cut out of. All three are under two hundred pages.

It found a very large new readership in 2020, and not as an allegory. Readers recognised the sealed city, the rumours, the boredom and the small administrative cruelties directly. It is longer and slower than The Stranger, and it is the book of his that most people say changed how they think about ordinary competence under pressure.