Author Guide · Philosophy & Fiction
Books Written by
On 4 January 1960 the police pulled an unused train ticket from the pocket of a man killed when a Facel Vega left the road at Villeblevin. Camus had meant to take the train back to Paris; a friend offered him a seat in the car instead. He was 46, and he had collected the Nobel Prize in Literature two years earlier. Behind him were three published novels, four plays, two book-length philosophical essays and a shelf of collected journalism. In the mud beside the wreck was the manuscript of the novel he never finished.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 books · novels, essays & plays · 1942–1998 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Albert Camus wrote five novels, three published in his lifetime and two after his death, plus one short story collection, four plays and two book-length philosophical essays: twelve major works. Counting every volume of essays and journalism as well, he published eighteen books in his lifetime. Below are the ten still in print in English, then the full list of everything else, and why other sites give a different number.
Where to Start with Albert Camus
If you have never read him
→ The Stranger (1942).
If you want the reasoning behind it
→ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
If you want the novel that keeps coming back
→ The Plague (1947).
If you want the man rather than the argument
→ The First Man (1994).
Albert Camus’s Books in Order: The Ten Still in Print
Novels
Three published in his lifetime, two found and printed after his death.
The Stranger
L’Étranger, published in Britain as The Outsider. Meursault buries his mother without crying, starts an affair the next day, and shoots an unnamed Arab man on a blinding Algiers beach. At the trial, the prosecution spends more time on the funeral than on the killing.
The flattest narrator in modern fiction, and deliberately so — the whole argument sits in what Meursault refuses to pretend to feel. Note the title: British editions are called The Outsider, American ones The Stranger. Same book.
— LisanneThe Plague
La Peste. Rats die in the streets of Oran, the gates close, and the city spends ten months sealed off. Dr Rieux keeps working. A journalist tries to get out to his wife. A priest preaches that the plague is punishment. A clerk keeps rewriting the first sentence of a novel he will never finish.
Read for fifty years as an allegory of the German occupation, then read again in 2020 by people who recognised the boredom, the rumours and the petty administrative cruelties on sight.
— LisanneThe Fall
La Chute. In a bar in Amsterdam, a former Paris defence lawyer talks at a stranger for five nights. Somewhere in the monologue is the night he heard a woman go into the Seine behind him and kept walking.
One unbroken address to a listener who never speaks — the closest Camus came to a formal experiment, and the book several critics rate as his best. Also set almost entirely in Amsterdam, which is a strange thing to find on a Dutch reader’s doorstep.
— LisanneA Happy Death
La Mort heureuse, written between 1936 and 1938 and left in a drawer. Patrice Mersault — one letter off the later name — kills the rich invalid Roland Zagreus for his money and spends it on time: travel, a house above the bay, the freedom to die on his own terms.
Camus abandoned it, then took it apart for parts. You can watch The Stranger being extracted from it. A first draft of a mind rather than a first draft of a book.
— LisanneThe First Man
Le Premier Homme; English translation 1995. The manuscript recovered from the mud beside the wreck of the car. An unfinished autobiographical novel about a fatherless boy in a two-room flat in Belcourt, a mother who could neither read nor write, and the schoolteacher who got him out.
Unrevised, unfinished, and by some distance the warmest thing he wrote. His daughter Catherine transcribed and published it thirty-four years after the crash, marginal notes and all.
— LisanneShort fiction
The only collection of stories he published.
Exile and the Kingdom
L’Exil et le Royaume. Six stories: a French schoolteacher in Algeria ordered to march an Arab prisoner to the police, a woman on a night bus through the desert, a cooper whose trade is disappearing, a painter losing his solitude to admirers. The only story collection he published.
The one place where the Algeria of his childhood is written plainly instead of used as a stage for an argument. ‘The Guest’ gets anthologised constantly and still lands.
— LisannePhilosophical essays
Two book-length arguments. The rest of his nonfiction is journalism and shorter collections, listed further down.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Camus opens by declaring that there is only one serious philosophical problem, and it is suicide: whether life is worth living once you accept that it arrives without a given meaning. He works the question through Don Juan, the actor, the conqueror, and finally a man pushing a boulder uphill forever.
The last line — one must imagine Sisyphus happy — is the most compressed statement of his whole position. Read it directly after The Stranger; it is the same argument with the scaffolding left visible.
— LisanneThe Rebel
L’Homme révolté. A history of revolt running from Prometheus and Sade through the French and Russian revolutions, arguing that a rebellion which sets no limit on itself ends up building the machinery it set out to destroy.
The book that ended his friendship with Sartre. 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. Worth reading for the rupture as much as the argument.
— LisannePlays
Four original plays, sold in English as one volume.
Caligula and Three Other Plays
Stuart Gilbert’s translation, with Camus’s own preface. An emperor treats the meaninglessness of the world as a licence and starts killing on principle; three later plays take up murder, occupation and the price of political violence. The English volume collects Caligula, The Misunderstanding, State of Siege and The Just Assassins, first published in French between 1944 and 1950.
Camus thought of himself as a man of the theatre at least as much as a novelist. The plays are where he tests the arguments of the essays on a live audience.
— LisanneNotebooks
For readers who already know the work.
Notebooks 1935–1951
Working journals kept from his early twenties on: reading lists, overheard lines, first sketches of Meursault and Rieux, and the flat daily entries of a man with tuberculosis in occupied France. This one-volume English edition combines the first two French Carnets, published in 1962 and 1964; a third volume covering 1951 to 1959 appeared separately in 1989.
Where you watch the books assemble themselves. Skip it if you are starting out; go there once you have read four or five and want to see the workshop.
— LisanneAlbert Camus Works in Chronological Order: The Complete List
Every book published under his name, from his first essays in Algiers in 1937 to The First Man in 1994: twenty-five titles. The first twenty appeared in his lifetime — eighteen of his own books and two stage adaptations — and the last five after his death. Titles that have an entry above link to it.
| Year | In English | French title | Form |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1937 | Betwixt and Between | L’Envers et l’endroit | Essays |
| 1939 | Nuptials | Noces | Essays |
| 1942 | The Stranger | L’Étranger | Novel |
| 1942 | The Myth of Sisyphus | Le Mythe de Sisyphe | Philosophy |
| 1944 | The Misunderstanding and Caligula | Le Malentendu, Caligula | Plays |
| 1945 | Letters to a German Friend | Lettres à un ami allemand | Essays |
| 1947 | The Plague | La Peste | Novel |
| 1948 | State of Siege | L’État de siège | Play |
| 1950 | The Just Assassins | Les Justes | Play |
| 1950 | Actuelles I | Actuelles I | Journalism |
| 1951 | The Rebel | L’Homme révolté | Philosophy |
| 1953 | Actuelles II | Actuelles II | Journalism |
| 1954 | Summer | L’Été | Essays |
| 1956 | The Fall | La Chute | Novel |
| 1956 | Requiem for a Nun | Requiem pour une nonne | Stage adaptation |
| 1957 | Exile and the Kingdom | L’Exil et le royaume | Short stories |
| 1957 | Reflections on the Guillotine | Réflexions sur la guillotine | Essay |
| 1958 | Nobel speeches | Discours de Suède | Speeches |
| 1958 | Algerian Chronicles | Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes | Journalism |
| 1959 | The Possessed | Les Possédés | Stage adaptation |
| 1962 | Notebooks I | Carnets I | Notebooks · posthumous |
| 1964 | Notebooks II | Carnets II | Notebooks · posthumous |
| 1971 | A Happy Death | La Mort heureuse | Novel · posthumous |
| 1989 | Notebooks III | Carnets III | Notebooks · posthumous |
| 1994 | The First Man | Le Premier Homme | Novel · posthumous |
Years are first publication in French. English translations usually followed within a few years; Actuelles I and II and the Nobel speeches have no standalone English edition.
How Many Books Did Albert Camus Write?
Five novels, one story collection, four plays and two philosophical essays: twelve major works. Every list gives a different total, for four reasons.
- Two novels appeared after he died — A Happy Death was written in the 1930s and printed in 1971; The First Man was unfinished in the car and printed in 1994. Three novels in his lifetime, five in total. Read the entries →
- The four plays are three volumes — Caligula and Le Malentendu were published together in 1944. Count plays and you get four; count books and you get three. Read the entries →
- The journalism is nine volumes nobody lists — Three volumes of Actuelles political columns, L’Envers et l’endroit, Noces, L’Été, Lettres à un ami allemand, the essay on capital punishment written with Koestler, and the Nobel address. Add them and the lifetime total reaches eighteen. See the full list →
- The adaptations are usually left out — He also published stage adaptations of Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1956) and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1959). Include those and you are at twenty. See the full list →
In What Order to Read Albert Camus
In his lifetime: The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus (both 1942), The Plague (1947), The Rebel (1951), The Fall (1956) and Exile and the Kingdom (1957), alongside the plays and nine volumes of essays and journalism. After his death: A Happy Death (1971), the three volumes of Carnets (1962, 1964 and 1989), and The First Man (1994). Only one pair really needs reading in order, and it is not chronological: The Stranger then The Myth of Sisyphus. Everything else stands alone. A Happy Death is the exception in reverse — it was written first and reads best last, once you know what he took out of it.
A reading path
1. The Stranger (1942)
2. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
3. The Plague (1947)
4. The Fall (1956)
5. The First Man (1994)
Everything Else Albert Camus Wrote: The Full List
The ten above are the books still in print in English. These are the rest: the essays and journalism that make up his eighteen lifetime volumes, the plays as they first appeared in French, his two stage adaptations and the notebooks.
Open a form with the + to see every book in it.
Essays and journalism
9
9 books · 1937–1958
- 1937Betwixt and BetweenL’Envers et l’endroit, his first book, five essays published in Algiers
- 1939NuptialsNoces, four lyrical essays on Tipasa, Djemila and Algiers
- 1945Letters to a German FriendLettres à un ami allemand, four letters written under the occupation
- 1950Actuelles Ipolitical columns and articles, 1944–1948
- 1953Actuelles IIpolitical columns and articles, 1948–1953
- 1954SummerL’Été, essays including ‘Return to Tipasa’
- 1957Reflections on the Guillotinehis essay against the death penalty, published with Arthur Koestler’s
- 1958Discours de Suèdehis two Nobel addresses, in Stockholm and Uppsala
- 1958Algerian ChroniclesActuelles III: Chroniques algériennes, his writing on Algeria, 1939–1958
Plays, as first published in French
3
3 books · 1944–1950
- 1944The Misunderstanding and CaligulaLe Malentendu and Caligula, in one volume
- 1948State of SiegeL’État de siège
- 1950The Just AssassinsLes Justes
Stage adaptations
2
2 books · 1956–1959
- 1956Requiem for a NunRequiem pour une nonne, from Faulkner’s novel
- 1959The PossessedLes Possédés, from Dostoevsky, which he also directed
Notebooks
3
3 books · 1962–1989
- 1962Carnets IMay 1935 to February 1942
- 1964Carnets IIJanuary 1942 to March 1951
- 1989Carnets IIIMarch 1951 to December 1959
The years · 1913–1960
Quick facts about Albert Camus
- Known for
- Albert Camus was known for the philosophy of the absurd, set out in novels and essays such as The Stranger, The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus.
- 1913
- Born in Mondovi, French Algeria
- 1942
- The Stranger
- 1960
- Dies in a car crash, aged 46
- Born
- 7 November 1913, Mondovi, French Algeria
- Died
- 4 January 1960, aged 46 — a car crash at Villeblevin, about 17 km from Sens
- Nobel Prize
- Literature, 1957, at 43 — awarded for the body of work, not one book
- Volumes in his lifetime
- Eighteen, plus two posthumous novels
- Not an existentialist
- He rejected the label; The Rebel (1951) ended the friendship with Sartre
- Wrote in
- French — the English titles on this page are translations
- Best known works
- The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus
The red mark is 1942: The Stranger, the first title among his best-known works.
How Camus Writes: The Argument Told Twice
He wrote almost every idea twice — once as a story and once as an argument — and published the pair together. The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus both came out in 1942 and are the same claim in two registers. The Plague and The Rebel repeat the pattern: the novel first, the reasoning afterwards.
The prose itself is deliberately unliterary. Short declarative sentences, the perfect tense where French normally reaches for something more elegant, and a refusal to tell the reader what to feel. It reads as flat, and the flatness is the argument: Meursault is the only character who will not pretend.
The exception is the Algerian writing. In Noces, in L’Été and in The First Man, the sentences open right up — sun, sea, dust, poverty described without a philosophical point being made of it. Readers who only know the novels are usually surprised by how warm he can be.
And he kept changing his mind in public. The Rebel is an argument against the politics of his own friends, and it cost him the friendship. That willingness to lose the room is the thing that has aged best.
Watch
Albert Camus on writing, 1959
A clip from Gros plan, the French television programme directed by Pierre Cardinal, broadcast on 12 May 1959. Camus speaks about the profession of writer at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, where he had adapted and staged Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. In French; the clip opens at the INA archive.
Frequently asked questions about Albert Camus's books
How many books did Albert Camus write?
Albert Camus wrote five novels, one collection of short stories, four plays and two book-length philosophical essays: twelve major works. Counting every volume of essays and journalism, he published eighteen books in his lifetime; three of the novels appeared then, and A Happy Death (1971) and The First Man (1994) after his death. Totals elsewhere range from about 15 to 20 depending on whether the political columns, the notebooks and his stage adaptations are counted.
Are these all of Albert Camus's books?
No. The ten in the main list are the ones still in print in English. The complete chronological list on this page has twenty-five titles: everything he published in his lifetime, including the essays, journalism and stage adaptations, plus the notebooks and the two novels that appeared after his death.
What did Albert Camus write?
Novels (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and the posthumous A Happy Death and The First Man), short stories (Exile and the Kingdom), philosophical essays (The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), four plays including Caligula, nine volumes of essays and journalism, two stage adaptations, and three volumes of notebooks.
What are Albert Camus's books in order?
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.
Did Albert Camus write in English?
No. Camus wrote everything in French; all the English titles are translations. That is why some of his books have two English names, such as The Stranger in the United States and The Outsider in Britain.
What is the best Albert Camus book to start with?
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.
Was Albert Camus an existentialist?
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.
What is Camus's philosophy of the absurd?
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.
Which book was Camus writing when he died?
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.
What book did Albert Camus win the Nobel Prize for?
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.
What is the difference between The Stranger and The Outsider?
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.
Did Albert Camus write anything after The Fall?
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.
Which Camus book should I read if I liked The Stranger?
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.
Is The Plague worth reading now?
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.
Footnotes
- Albert Camus — Nobel Prize facts
- Albert Camus — Britannica
- How did Albert Camus die? — Britannica
- Albert Camus — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre — University of Chicago Press
- Albert Camus about writing, Gros plan, 12 May 1959 — INA
Bibliography last verified 5 October 2026.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”, in Summer (1954); translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsRead next
